Vignettes of Manhattan; Outlines in Local ColorMatthews, Brander
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Vignettes of Manhattan; Outlines in Local Color
Matthews, Brander
Manhattan (New York, N.Y.) -- Fiction; Short stories, American
When the concert came to an end at last, as the brief twilight was
waning, when the Solo Orchestra had played the "Anvil Chorus" as a final
encore after the "Turkish Patrol," when Professor Theophilus Briggs,
after taking up the collection himself, had shaken hands with me when I
went down to convey to him our thanks, when it was so plainly evident
that the performance was over at last that even the children accepted
the inevitable and began to scatter--then the self-possessed little girl
on the opposite side of the way rose to her feet with dignity. When the
tall musician, with the bells jingling in his peaked hat, crossed the
street, she took his hand as though he belonged to her. As he walked
away she trotted along by his side, smiling up at him.
"I see now," I said; "that must be his granddaughter, the future
impersonator of the great dual character, Little Eva and Topsy."
(1896.)
THE REHEARSAL OF THE NEW PLAY
When Wilson Carpenter came to the junction of the two great
thoroughfares he stood still for a moment and looked at his watch, not
wishing to arrive at the rehearsal too early. He found that it was then
almost eight o'clock, and he began at once to pick his way across the
car-tracks that were here twisted in every direction. A cloud of steam
swirled down as a train on the elevated railroad clattered along over
his head; the Cyclops eye of a cable-car glared at him as it came
rushing down-town; from the steeple of a church on the corner, around
which the mellow harvest-moon peered down on the noisy streets, there
came the melodious call to the evening service; over the entrance to a
variety show a block above a gaudy cluster of electric lights
illuminated the posters which proclaimed for that evening a Grand Sacred
Concert, at which Queenie Dougherty, the Irish Empress, would sing her
new song, "He's an Illigant Man in a Scrap, My Boys." As the young
dramatist sped along he noted that people were still straggling by twos
and threes into the house of worship and into the place of
entertainment; and he could not but contrast swiftly this Sunday
evening in a great city with the Sunday evenings of his boyhood in the
little village of his birth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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