Hill, and he can watch the
vessels as they come in from Japan," he would continue in his precise
voice, emphasizing admirably the last syllables of the words "Russian,"
"vessels," and "Japan." "Wouldn't you like to see the letter?"

To do Hannah justice, although she was quite incapable of sharing his
passion, she frequently feigned an interest, took the letter, presently
handing it on to Janet who, in deciphering Alpheus's trembling
calligraphy, pondered over his manifold woes. Alpheus's son, who had had
a good position in a sporting goods establishment on Market Street, was
sick and in danger of losing it, the son's wife expecting an addition to
the family, the house on Russian Hill mortgaged. Alpheus, a veteran of
the Civil War, had been for many years preparing his reminiscences, but
the newspapers nowadays seemed to care nothing for matters of solid
worth, and so far had refused to publish them.... Janet, as she read,
reflected that these letters invariably had to relate tales of failures,
of disappointed hopes; she wondered at her father's perennial interest in
failures,--provided they were those of his family; and the next evening,
as he wrote painfully on his ruled paper, she knew that he in turn was
pouring out his soul to Alpheus, recounting, with an emotion by no means
unpleasurable, to this sympathetic but remote relative the story of his
own failure!

If the city of Hampton was emblematic of our modern world in which
haphazardness has replaced order, Fillmore Street may be likened to a
back eddy of the muddy and troubled waters, in which all sorts of flotsam
and jetsam had collected. Or, to find perhaps an even more striking
illustration of the process that made Hampton in general and Fillmore
Street in particular, one had only to take the trolley to Glendale, the
Italian settlement on the road leading to the old New England village of
Shrewsbury. Janet sometimes walked there, alone or with her friend Eda
Rawle. Disintegration itself--in a paradoxically pathetic attempt at
reconstruction--had built Glendale. Human hands, Italian hands. Nor,
surprising though it may seem, were these descendants of the people of
the Renaissance in the least offended by their handiwork. When the
southern European migration had begun and real estate became valuable,
one by one the more decorous edifices of the old American order had been
torn down and carried piecemeal by sons of Italy to the bare hills of
Glendale, there to