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Updated: June 7, 2025
A tow-headed boy, watched from an up-stairs window by two admiring small boys, was walking around the edge of the porch roof, balancing himself with outstretched arms. A neat negro woman, emptying an ash-can in the adjoining yard, caught sight of him and shrieked, "Uh, John Edward! is that you on the porch roof? or is it Elmore? Whichever you be, if you don't go right in, I'll tell yo' ma.
Kaufman's private boarding-house in West Eighty-ninth Street, one of a breastwork of brownstone fronts, lined up stoop for stoop, story for story, and ash-can for ash-can, there were few enough greasy odors except upon the weekly occasion of Monday's boiled dinner; and, whatever the status of liver and dried peaches, canned corn and round steak, her menus remained static so static that in the gas-lighted basement dining-room and at a remote end of the long, well-surrounded table Mrs.
Clutching it and kicking footloose, he was stunned by the wonder of many brilliant new-born constellations swirling round his poor head to the thunderous music of the spheres, as rendered by the ash-can which, displaced by the vigour of his acrobatics, had toppled over and was rolling and clattering hideously on the flagging.
These thefts were in the line of jewelry and the like; and were as daringly wrought as were the modest local operators' raids on ash-can and laundry. It is the easiest thing in the world to stir humankind's ever-tense burglar-nerves into hysterical jangling.
The double row of stone houses, blank-faced and shouldering one another like paper dolls cut from a folded newspaper, stood back indistinctly against the night, most of the high stoops cushioned in untrod snow, the fourth of them from the right, lean-looking and undistinguished, except that the ash-can at its curb was a glorified urn of snow.
Also, it lasted longer than the ordinary pinwheel, and was a trifle more uproarious; but it died at last with a sizzling spit, and a lean black streak shot out toward the haven of an alley's mouth. The streak was Ash-Can Sam. Omar Ben Sufi sat down in the middle of the street, and wondered. He had thrashed something, and he didn't understand it.
The patrician declined to "beat it," and Ash-Can Sam edged a little closer, wearing a dissolute, wicked leer of joy. He circled slowly round the stranger cat, eying Omar Ben's glossy coat and humming a sort of vulgar chant: Ain't it a sham-m-m-m-e! To chaw up mommer's sugar-pet, An' hurt his nose, not soon, but yet. Oh, ain't it a sham-m-m-m-e! Omar Ben regarded the bully in calm scorn.
An umbrella, however, usually turns inside out before it gets you off the pavement, and then it looks like a wrecked Zeppelin. You put it in the first ash-can, and walk off in an attempt not to be conspicuous.
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