THE BRASS BOWL
Simultaneously he surveyed both sides of the short block between Seventh and St. Nicholas Avenues with one comprehensive glance.
Presumably he saw nothing of interest to him. It was not a particularly interesting block, for that matter: though somewhat typical of the neighborhood. The north side was lined with five-story flat buildings, their dingy-red brick façades regularly broken by equally dingy brownstone stoops, as to the ground floor, by open windows as to those above. The south side was mostly taken up by a towering white apartment hotel with an ostentatious entrance; against one of whose polished stone pillars the short and thick-set man was lounging.
The sidewalks, north and south, swarmed with children of assorted ages, playing with that ferocious energy characteristic of the young of Harlem; their blood-curdling cries and premature Fourth-of-July fireworks created an appalling din: to which, however, the more mature denizens had apparently become callous, through long endurance.
Beyond the party-colored lights of a drug-store
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