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Updated: June 24, 2025
In their absurd and heavy uniforms, and with nothing whatever to do, the poor country fellows presented a miserable appearance as they sat in rows along the curbstones of the avenues, with their helmets glittering in the August sun, "looking," as some one remarked, "like so many rare beetles on exhibition," the spectacle being all the more ludicrous from the extreme dejection of the innocent heroes.
They do not wait for the actual brute contact of red bricks and curbstones, but they feel the danger miles away. The Indians called the low plantain "the white man's footstep"; and these shy creatures gradually disappear, the moment the red man gets beyond their hearing. Bigelow's delightful "Florula Bostoniensis" is becoming a series of epitaphs.
It was a fancy, of course; the street was sufficiently peopled with Christian children, at any rate, swarming and shrieking at their games; and presently a Christian mother appeared, pushed along by two policemen on a handcart, with a gelatinous tremor over the paving and a gelatinous jouncing at the curbstones.
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.
I believe I never saw him but once; but he was much talked of when I lived there. This is what was said of him He began life poor and without education. But he educated himself on the curbstones of Keokuk.
If you are another kind of a boy, you may be careful enough about oiling and cleaning the wheel, but you may also be reckless and head strong and will jump over curbstones and gutters or ride it over rough roads at a dangerous rate of speed, and in this way shorten its life by abuse just as the careless boy may by neglect.
Here were rivers, lakes, and oceans for navigation; easy pilotage, for the steersman had but to wade beside his craft and guide it with a twig. Jane's timely boat was one of the first to reach the water. Her mother had been kind, and Jane, with shoes and stockings left behind her on the porch, was a happy sailor as she waded knee-deep along the brimming curbstones.
We much preferred to sit on the sunken curbstones, in the shade of the broad-leaved burdocks, and shape their spiny balls into chairs and cradles and sofas for our dollies, or to "play school" on the doorsteps, or to climb over the wall, and to feel the freedom of the hill. We were a neighborhood of large families, and most of us enjoyed the privilege of "a little wholesome neglect."
In fact, foreign faces and foreign tongues prevailed in Greenwich Village, but no longer German or even Irish tongues or faces. The eyes and earrings of Italians twinkled in and out of the alleyways and basements, and they seemed to abound even in the streets, where long ranks of trucks drawn up in Sunday rest along the curbstones suggested the presence of a race of sturdier strength than theirs.
They soon passed beyond the region of sidewalks and curbstones, and began picking their steps through a narrow, humid lane, where the water lay in slimy pools, and the tenement houses on each side blotted out the faint starlight. The night was sultry, and door and casement stood wide, making pits of darkness.
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