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Along the curbstones are stationed wagons for the sale of the wind and string instruments, whose raw, harsh discords of whistling and twanging will begin with the sight of the vote from the first precinct.

Once, when a quack undertook to take the public by storm with his "New and Sure Cure for Dyspepsia," Fink & Co. put a colored poster as large as a dining table on every wall and high fence below Sixty-first street; small oblong bills every ten feet along the curbstones of Broadway, Bowery, Wall street, Fulton street, Cortlandt street, and Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, Madison, and Lexington Avenues; besides throwing cheap circulars, folded, into the front yards of about four thousand residences in the fashionable quarters of the town all in a single night.

Beer saloons, cheap grocery stores, carts against the curbstones with their shafts pointing skyward, and troops of children on the sidewalk, marked the increasing poverty and density of the population.

Two workmen took long strides side by side, talking to each other in loud voices, with any amount of gesticulation, but without looking at one another; others who were alone in overcoats and caps walked along the curbstones with lowered noses; others again came in parties of five or six, following each other, with pale eyes and their hands in their pockets and not exchanging a word.

The dust, waste-paper-littered, was still deep in the streets; the deep, trough-like gutters alongside the curbstones were still half full of reposeful water with a dusty surface; the sidewalks were still in the sugar and bacon region encumbered by casks and barrels and hogsheads; the great blocks of austerely plain commercial houses were as dusty- looking as ever.

These two houses opened directly on the street and their slanting roofs were shaded by tall trees rooted at the curbstones. This outline of Fenimore Cooper's birthplace is from the text-picture in "Literary Rambles," by Theodore F. Wolfe, M.D., Ph.D. The first of his father's family in this new country was James Cooper, who came from Stratford-on-Avon, England, in 1679.

It is a handsome city with the water of the Platte river brung in and running along in little streams by the curbstones. We rode out to Idaho Springs on a narrer railroad but easy goin', through Clear Creek Canon.

Few people were visible and these were divided sharply into two categories: those clearly intent upon concluding some business, rushing furiously, papers, briefcases or articles of worth in their hands; and those obviously without purpose, dazed, listless, stumbling against the curbstones as they shambled along, casting furtive glances toward the green glacier in the background.

Outside the weather continued lamentable. The rain beat down steadily upon the heaps of snow on the grass-plats by the curbstones, melting it, dirtying it, and reducing it to viscid slush. The sky was lead grey; the trees, bare and black as though built of iron and wire, dripped incessantly.

All these overgrown, naughty fellows one sees everywhere like street boys on the corners or on the curbstones of society, calling society names and taking liberties with it, tripping people up; hoodlums with dollars, all these micks of money!