Booksellers and bookselling -- Fiction; Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.) -- Fiction; Mystery and detective stories
Nevertheless, he thought about it a good deal, stimulated from time to
time as in the course of his walk (which led him out toward the
faubourgs of Flatbush) he passed long vistas of signboards, which he
imagined placarded with vivid lithographs in behalf of the Chapman
prunes. "Adam and Eve Ate Prunes On Their Honeymoon" was a slogan that
flashed into his head, and he imagined a magnificent painting
illustrating this text. Thus, in hours of stress, do all men turn for
comfort to their chosen art. The poet, battered by fate, heals himself
in the niceties of rhyme. The prohibitionist can weather the blackest
melancholia by meditating the contortions of other people's abstinence.
The most embittered citizen of Detroit will never perish by his own
hand while he has an automobile to tinker.
Aubrey walked many miles, gradually throwing his despair to the winds.
The bright spirits of Orison Swett Marden and Ralph Waldo Trine,
Dioscuri of Good Cheer, seemed to be with him reminding him that
nothing is impossible. In a small restaurant he found sausages,
griddle cakes and syrup. When he got back to Gissing Street it was
dark, and he girded his soul for further endeavour.
About nine o'clock he walked up the alley. He had left his overcoat in
his room at Mrs. Schiller's and also the Cromwell bookcover--having
taken the precaution, however, to copy the inscriptions into his pocket
memorandum-book. He noticed lights in the rear of the bookshop, and
concluded that the Mifflins and their employee had got home safely.
Arrived at the back of Weintraub's pharmacy, he studied the contours of
the building carefully.
The drug store lay, as we have explained before, at the corner of
Gissing Street and Wordsworth Avenue, just where the Elevated railway
swings in a long curve. The course of this curve brought the
scaffolding of the viaduct out over the back roof of the building, and
this fact had impressed itself on Aubrey's observant eye the day
before. The front of the drug store stood three storeys, but in the
rear it dropped to two, with a flat roof over the hinder portion. Two
windows looked out upon this roof. Weintraub's back yard opened onto
the alley, but the gate, he found, was locked. The fence would not be
hard to scale, but he hesitated to make so direct an approach.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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