So they went up the stairs, Frieda panting behind, and I leaned against a decrepit iron railing. A few steps away some colored men were assembled about a lamppost, their laughter coming explosively, in repeated peals. Opposite me, within an exiguous front yard, a very fat man sat on a rickety chair, the back resting against the wall, and gave me an uncomfortable sense of impending collapse of the spindly legs. Boys, playing ball in the middle of the street, stopped suddenly and assumed an air of profound detachment from things terrestrial as a policeman went by, majestic and leisurely, swinging his club. Somewhere west of me an accordion was whining variations on Annie Laurie, but, suddenly, its grievous voice was drowned by a curtain lecture addressed to a deep bass by an exasperated soprano. To the whole world his sins were proclaimed with a wealth of detail and an imagery of expression that excited my admiration. Then the clamor ceased abruptly and a man's head appeared at the window. I speculated whether he was contemplating self-destruction, but he vanished, to appear a moment later in the street, garmented in trousers, carpet-slippers and undershirt and armed with an empty beer-pail. With this he faded away in the corner saloon, to come forth again with his peace-offering. With such observations I solaced myself and whiled away the time. Humanity in the rough is to me fully as interesting as the dull stones picked up in Brazil or the Cape Colony. Some are hopelessly flawed, while others need but patient grinding to develop into diamonds of the first water. Nearly a half an hour had gone by, and I had seated myself upon the railing, in a position once dear to me when I shared a fence with Sadie Briggs, aged fourteen, and thought that the ultimate had come to me in the way of love and passion. Fortunate Sadie! She afterwards married a blacksmith and did her duty to the world by raising a large family, while I pounded typewriter keys and wrote of imaginary loves, in shirt-sleeves and slippers, lucky in the egotistic peace of the enviable mortal responsible for no human being's bread and butter but his own. Then Frieda and Frances appeared. The latter held her baby in her arms, surely feeling that it had received enough vicarious attention. "Why, Dave!" exclaimed the former. "I'm awfully sorry you waited so long. Our little darling was sleeping ever so comfy, like a blessed angel, and we sat down, while Madame Boivin rested from her ironing, and we just talked about starch and cockroaches and things, and then Paul awoke and we were afraid he might cry in the street and it was nearly time anyway and--and he was ever so greedy. And now he's sleeping again."