Produced by Suzanne Shell, Charlie Kirschner and the PG Distributed Proofreaders [Illustration: HE CAPERED THROUGH THE MELODY OF DVORAK'S, WHICH IS AS IRONIC AS A GRINNING MASK] HUMORESQUE A LAUGH ON LIFE WITH A TEAR BEHIND IT By FANNIE HURST 1920 CONTENTS HUMORESQUE OATS FOR THE WOMAN A PETAL ON THE CURRENT WHITE GOODS "HEADS" A BOOB SPELLED BACKWARD EVEN AS YOU AND I THE WRONG PEW HUMORESQUE On either side of the Bowery, which cuts through like a drain to catch its sewage, Every Man's Land, a reeking march of humanity and humidity, steams with the excrement of seventeen languages, flung in _patois_ from tenement windows, fire escapes, curbs, stoops, and cellars whose walls are terrible and spongy with fungi. By that impregnable chemistry of race whereby the red blood of the Mongolian and the red blood of the Caucasian become as oil and water in the mingling, Mulberry Street, bounded by sixteen languages, runs its intact Latin length of pushcarts, clotheslines, naked babies, drying vermicelli; black-eyed women in rhinestone combs and perennially big with child; whole families of buttonhole-makers, who first saw the blue-and-gold light of Sorrento, bent at home work round a single gas flare; pomaded barbers of a thousand Neapolitan amours. And then, just as suddenly, almost without osmosis and by the mere stepping down from the curb, Mulberry becomes Mott Street, hung in grillwork balconies, the moldy smell of poverty touched up with incense. Orientals whose feet shuffle and whose faces are carved out of satinwood. Forbidden women, their white, drugged faces behind upper windows. Yellow children, incongruous enough in Western clothing. A draughty areaway with an oblique of gaslight and a black well of descending staircase. Show-windows of jade and tea and Chinese porcelains. More streets emanating out from Mott like a handful of crooked rheumatic fingers, then suddenly the Bowery again, cowering beneath Elevated trains, where men burned down to the butt end of soiled lives pass in and out and out and in of the knee-high swinging doors, a veiny-nosed, acid-eaten race in themselves.