Kissed them and put them there.
And now Little Boy Blue again climbs the long stairs. He stretches up on tiptoe to turn the door-knob at the top. He listens as a prudent explorer should. Cook rattles her tins below, but it is a far- off sound as from another world. Somewhere, doubtless, the friendly milkman's bell goes jingling up the street. There is a distant barking of familiar dogs. Will it not be better to return to the safe regions and watch the traffic from the window? But here, beckoning, is the great adventure.
The brave die is cast. He advances with outstretched arms into the darkness. Suddenly, behind him, the door swings shut. The sound of cooking-tins is lost. Silence. Silence, except for branches scratching on the roof. But the garret hears the sound of feet, and it rouses itself and rubs its dusky eyes.
But when darkness thickens and the sunlight has vanished from the floor, then comes the magic hour. The garret then tears from its eyes the blind bandage of the day. Strange creatures lift their heads. And now, as you wait expectant, there comes a mysterious sound from the darkest corner. Is it a mouse that stirs? Rather, it seems a far-off sound, as though a blind man, tapping with his stick, walked on the margin of the world. The noise comes near. It gains in volume. It is close at hand. Dear lad, you have come upon the magic hour. It is the tread of the friendly giants that is sounding in the dark….
ON SPENDING A HOLIDAY
t a party lately a worn subject came under discussion.
Our host lives in a triangular stone-paved courtyard tucked off from the thoroughfare but with the rattle of the elevated railway close at hand. The building is of decent brick, three stories in height, and it exhibits to the courtyard a row of identical doorsteps. The entrance to the courtyard is a swinging shutter between buildings facing on the street, and it might seem a mystery—like the apple in the dumpling—how the building inside squeezed through so narrow an entrance. Yet here it is, with a rubber plant in one corner and a trellis for imaginary vines in the other.
In this courtyard, Pomander Walk might be acted along the stoops. For a necessary stage property—you recall, of course, the lamplighter with his ladder in the second act!—there is a gas lamp of old design in the middle of the enclosure, up near the footlights, as it were. From the stoops the main comedy might proceed, with certain business at the upper windows—the profane Admiral with the timber leg popping his head out of one, the mysterious fat man—in some sort the villain of the piece—putting his head out of another to woo the buxom widow at a third. And then the muffin man! In the twilight when the lamp is lighted and the heroine at last is in the hero's arms, there would be a pleasant crunching of muffins at all the windows as the curtain falls.
But I shall not drop even a hint as to the location of this courtyard. Many persons think that New York City is but a massive gridiron, and they are ignorant of the nooks and quirks and angles of the lower town. Enough that the Indian of a modest tobacconist guards the swinging shutter of the entrance to the courtyard.