f decent brick, three stories in height, and it
exhibits to the courtyard a row of identical doorsteps. The entrance
to the courtyard is a swinging shutter between buildings facing on the
street, and it might seem a mystery--like the apple in the
dumpling--how the building inside squeezed through so narrow an
entrance. Yet here it is, with a rubber plant in one corner and a
trellis for imaginary vines in the other.

In this courtyard, _Pomander Walk_ might be acted along the stoops.
For a necessary stage property--you recall, of course, the lamplighter
with his ladder in the second act!--there is a gas lamp of old design
in the middle of the enclosure, up near the footlights, as it were.
From the stoops the main comedy might proceed, with certain business
at the upper windows--the profane Admiral with the timber leg popping
his head out of one, the mysterious fat man--in some sort the villain
of the piece--putting his head out of another to woo the buxom widow
at a third. And then the muffin man! In the twilight when the lamp is
lighted and the heroine at last is in the hero's arms, there would be
a pleasant crunching of muffins at all the windows as the curtain
falls.

But I shall not drop even a hint as to the location of this courtyard.
Many persons think that New York City is but a massive gridiron, and
they are ignorant of the nooks and quirks and angles of the lower
town. Enough that the Indian of a modest tobacconist guards the
swinging shutter of the entrance to the courtyard.

Here we sat in the very window I had designed for the profane Admiral,
and talked in the quiet interval between trains.

One of our company--a man whom I shall call Flint--was hardy enough to
say that he never employed his leisure in going to the country--that a
walk about the city streets was his best refreshment. Flint's
livelihood is cotton. He is a dumpish sort of person who looks as if
he needed exercise, but he has a sharp clear eye. At first his remark
fell on us as a mere perversity, as of one who proclaims a humorous
whim. And yet he adhered tenaciously to his opinion, urging smooth
pavements against mud, the study of countless faces against the song
of birds and great buildings against cliffs.

Another of our company opposed him in this--Colum, who chafes as an
accountant. Colum is a gentle dreamy fellow who likes birds. All
winter he saves his tobacco tins which, in his two weeks' vacation in
the country, he sets up in tr