wo streets is the shortest. The
Blue Light does not consider that pharmacy is a thing of bric-a-brac,
scent and ice-cream soda. If you ask it for pain-killer it will not
give you a bonbon.

The Blue Light scorns the labour-saving arts of modern pharmacy. It
macerates its opium and percolates its own laudanum and paregoric.
To this day pills are made behind its tall prescription desk--pills
rolled out on its own pill-tile, divided with a spatula, rolled with
the finger and thumb, dusted with calcined magnesia and delivered in
little round pasteboard pill-boxes. The store is on a corner about
which coveys of ragged-plumed, hilarious children play and become
candidates for the cough drops and soothing syrups that wait for them
inside.

Ikey Schoenstein was the night clerk of the Blue Light and the friend of
his customers. Thus it is on the East Side, where the heart of pharmacy
is not glace. There, as it should be, the druggist is a counsellor, a
confessor, an adviser, an able and willing missionary and mentor whose
learning is respected, whose occult wisdom is venerated and whose
medicine is often poured, untasted, into the gutter. Therefore Ikey's
corniform, be-spectacled nose and narrow, knowledge-bowed figure was
well known in the vicinity of the Blue Light, and his advice and notice
were much desired.

Ikey roomed and breakfasted at Mrs. Riddle's two squares away. Mrs.
Riddle had a daughter named Rosy. The circumlocution has been in
vain--you must have guessed it--Ikey adored Rosy. She tinctured all
his thoughts; she was the compound extract of all that was chemically
pure and officinal--the dispensatory contained nothing equal to her.
But Ikey was timid, and his hopes remained insoluble in the menstruum
of his backwardness and fears. Behind his counter he was a superior
being, calmly conscious of special knowledge and worth; outside he
was a weak-kneed, purblind, motorman-cursed rambler, with ill-fitting
clothes stained with chemicals and smelling of socotrine aloes and
valerianate of ammonia.

The fly in Ikey's ointment (thrice welcome, pat trope!) was Chunk
McGowan.

Mr. McGowan was also striving to catch the bright smiles tossed about by
Rosy. But he was no outfielder as Ikey was; he picked them off the bat.
At the same time he was Ikey's friend and customer, and often dropped in
at the Blue Light Drug Store to have a bruise painted with iodine or get
a cut rubber-plastered after a pleasant evening spent al