Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 2, 2025
Outside, not even to be gainsaid by Sixth Avenue, the night was like a moist flower held to the face. A spring shower, hardly fallen, was already drying on the sidewalks, and from the patch of Bryant Park across the maze of car-tracks there stole the immemorial scent of rain-water and black earth, a just-set-out crescent of hyacinths giving off their light steam of fragrance.
Montgomery Street had been filled up with brush and clay, and I always dreaded to ride on horseback along it, because the mud was so deep that a horse's legs would become entangled in the bushes below, and the rider was likely to be thrown and drowned in the mud. The only sidewalks were made of stepping-stones of empty boxes, and here and there a few planks with barrel-staves nailed on.
The rain splashed and spattered on the sidewalks, fairly flooding out the fruit venders and street merchants who withstood the deluge for a time and then were forced to vanish with their portable stores. The cabby, phlegmatic to wind and weather, sat on his box, shedding the moisture from his oil-skin coat and facing a cloud of steam which presumably concealed a horse.
In the better districts of Havana the driveways are twenty-three feet and the sidewalks about ten feet wide. Politeness keeps native and foreign men hopping up and down the foot deep curb to allow ladies a fair share of elbow-room on the pavements.
We had escorted the President back to the Palace, and I was returning to the barracks at the head of the Legion, with the local band playing grandly before me, and the people bowing from the sidewalks, when a girl on a gray pony turned into the plaza and rode toward us. She was followed by a group of white men, but I saw only the girl.
One could date them by their architecture, year after year, back to the Early 'Nineties, which is when civilisation began; could guess within a few score dollars at their cost and the incomes of their owners, and could ask questions about the new domestic appliances of to-day. 'Asphalt streets and concrete sidewalks came up a few years ago, said our host as we trotted over miles of it.
There was a bright glamour of moonlight diffusing on the sidewalks and lawns, and with a little half yawn, half laugh, she remembered one long moonlight affair of her youth. It was astonishing to think that life had once been the sum of her current love-affairs. It was now the sum of her current problems.
His friend had leaned forward, intensely, clutching his cane, with an unusually serious look on his face. Holloway had never seen Shirley take such an interest in any woman before. He arose from his desk-chair and walked to the broad window, which overlooked the thronging sidewalks of Broadway. "Down there is the biggest, busiest street in the world filled with women of all hues and shades.
The dogs, however, are not well fed, well groomed pets, fondled, kissed, collared, and blanketed, as in some other countries; but are ownerless, homeless creatures roaming at night in great numbers through the streets and sleeping by day on the thoroughfares and sidewalks regardless of passers-by. The people step over or go around the sleeping animals and do not disturb them.
And because ships had come there for a great many years and all the sailors and all the captains and all the men who had business with the ships had to go on that narrow road, the flagstones that made the sidewalks were much worn. That was a great many years ago.
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