United States or French Guiana ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
When Philadelphia was gained it was dark, and coming out of the big railroad station Joe at first knew not which way to turn. The noise and the crowd of people confused him. "Have a cab? Carriage?" bawled the hackmen. "Paper!" yelled a newsboy. "All the evenin' papers!" "Smash yer baggage!" called out a luggage boy, not near as tall as our hero.
I remembered my inability to fix my mind that morning, scarcely a month gone by, and how I had broken off to get my Daily Chronicle from the newsboy. I remembered how I went down to the garden gate as he came along, and how I had listened to his odd story of "Men from Mars." I came down and went into the dining room.
Come along, Stephen, the professor said. That is fine, isn't it? It has the prophetic vision. Fuit Ilium! The sack of windy Troy. Kingdoms of this world. The masters of the Mediterranean are fellaheen today. The first newsboy came pattering down the stairs at their heels and rushed out into the street, yelling: Racing special! Dublin. I have much, much to learn.
And yet after listening one seemed to hear a singular murmurous note, a pulsation, as if the crowd made noise by its mere living, a mellow hum of the eternal strife. Then suddenly out of the deeps might ring a human voice, a newsboy shout perhaps, the cry of a faraway jackal at night.
I have noticed, when he travels, that the face of the newsboy brightens as he buys a paper from him, that the porter is all happiness, that conductor and brakeman are devotedly anxious to be of aid. Everywhere the man wins love. He loves humanity and humanity responds to the love.
His figure was still bent, but the slouching, furtive movement was gone. Mechanically she fell into his stride and they moved swiftly up the street. A clock in a house across the way banged out the hour. Far away, in the neighborhood of Broadway, a raucous- voiced newsboy was crying his "extra." They knew that he was shouting: "All about the murder!" in that unintelligible jargon of the night.
The last crack of a triphammer, peckering at a giant pile of iron down the block, dies out on the dead air. A taxicab, rrrrr-ing in the street below, grunts its horn. A newsboy, in neuralgic yowl, bawls out a sporting extra. Another "L" train and the panes rattle again. A momentary quiet ... and from somewhere in a nearby street I hear a grind-organ. What is the tune it is playing?
"What's the matter, son? Stuck?" he said once to a newsboy who was crying with a heavy bundle of papers under his arm. "Come along with me, then," said Mr. Beecher, taking the boy's hand and leading him into the newspaper office a few doors up the street. "This boy is stuck," he simply said to the man behind the counter. "Guess The Eagle can stand it better than this boy; don't you think so?"
Ted and Jan were very desirous, each time, that the boy should sell something, and once, when he had gone through the car and had taken in no money, he looked so disappointed that Jan whispered to her father: "Won't you please buy something from him?" "Buy what?" asked Mr. Martin. "A book or some candy from the newsboy," repeated the little girl. "He looks awful sorry." "Hum!
Perhaps he is discontented with himself, perhaps troubled with ambitions; why, if he but knew it, he is a hero of the old Greek stamp; and while he thinks he is only earning a profit of a few cents, and that perhaps exorbitant, he is doing a man's work, and bettering the world. I must tell here an experience of mine with another newsboy.