Irish -- United States -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Runaway wives -- Fiction
Almost all the needs of a greater one could be supplied by the stores
fronting its sidewalks. If tea, coffee, sugar, and similar stimulating
and soothing groceries were wanted, old Bundleton, on the corner above
Kling's, in a white apron and paper cuffs, weighed them out. If it were
butter or eggs, milk, cream, or curds, the Long Island Dairy--which was
really old man Heffern, his daughter Mary, and his boy Tom--had them
in a paper bag, or on your plate, or into your pitcher before you could
count your change. If it were a sirloin, or lamb-chops, or Philadelphia
chickens, or a Cincinnati ham, fat Porterfield, watched over from her
desk by fat Mrs. Porterfield, dumped them on a pair of glittering brass
scales and sent them home to your kitchen invitingly laid out in a flat
wicker basket. If it were fish--fresh, salt, smoked, or otherwise--to
say nothing of crabs, oysters, clams, and the exclusive and expensive
lobster--it was Codman, a few doors above Porterfield's, who had them on
ice, or in barrels, the varnished claws of the lobsters thrust out like
the hands of a drowning man.
Were it a question of drugs, there was Pestler, the apothecary, with his
four big green globes illuminated by four big gas-jets, the joy of the
children. A small fellow this Pestler, with a round head and up-brushed
hair set on a long, thin stem of a neck, the whole growing out of a pair
of narrow shoulders, quite like a tulip from a glass jar.
And then there were Jarvis, the spectacle man, and that canny Scotchman
Sanderson, the florist, who knew the difference between roses a week
old and roses a day old, and who had the rare gift of so mixing the
two vintages that hardly enough dead stock was left over for funerals
including those presided over by his fellow conspirator Digwell, the
undertaker, who lived over his mausoleum of a back room.
And, of course, there were the bakeshop emitting enticing smells, mostly
of currants and burnt sugar, and the hardware store, full of nails and
pocket-knives, and old Mr. Jacobs, the tailor, who sat cross-legged on
a wide table in a room down four stone steps from the sidewalk, and the
grog-shops--more's the pity--one on every corner save Kling's.
Hardly a trace is now left of any one of them, so sudden and
overwhelming has been the march of modern progress. Even the little
Peter Cooper House, picked up bodily by that worthy philanthropist and
set down here nearly a hundred years ago, is gone, and so are the row
of musty, red-bricked houses at the lower end of this Little City in
Itself. And so are the tenants of this musty old row, shady locksmiths
with a tendency toward skeleton keys; ingenious upholsterers who
indulged in paper-hanging on the sly; shoemakers who did half-soling and
heeling, their day's work set to dry on the window-sill, not to mention
those addicted to the use of the piano, banjo, or harp, as well as the
wig and dress makers who lightened the general gloom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account