MEDITATIONS ON OYSTERS
Sansom street, below Ninth, runs a modest course through the middle of the afternoon, scooped between high and rather grimy walls so that a coolness and a shadow are upon it. It is a homely little channel, frequented by laundry wagons taking away great piles of soiled linen from the rear of the Continental Hotel, and little barefoot urchins pushing carts full of kindling wood picked up from the litter of splintered packing cases. On one side of the street is a big power-house where the drone and murmur of vast dynamos croon a soft undertone to the distant clang and zooming of the trolleys. Beyond that is the stage door of a burlesque theatre, and a faint sweetness of grease-paint drifts to the nose down a dark, mysterious passageway.
We walked down this little street, noticing the For Rent sign on a saloon at the corner and the pyramided boxes of green and yellow apples on a fruit stand, and it seemed to us that there was an unmistakable breath of autumn in the air. Out beyond, where the street widens and floods itself again with sun, there were heat and shimmer and the glittering plate-glass windows of jewelry dealers, but in the narrower strip of alley we felt a premonitory tang of future frost. At the end of August the sunlight gets yellower, more oblique; it loses the pale and deadly glare of earlier days.
