She had time now, had Carolyn May, to compare The Corners with the busy Harlem streets with which she had been familiar all her life. At this time of the afternoon the shady sides of the cross streets and the west side of the avenues were a-bustle with baby carriages and children, with nurses and mothers. And there were street pianos, and penny peep shows, and ice-cream-cone peddlers, and wagons, and many automobiles.
“Goodness me!” thought Carolyn May, startled by her own imagination, “suppose all the folks in all these houses around here were dead!”
They might have been, for all the human noises she heard. She could count seven dwellings from where she sat on the Stagg porch, and there were others not in sight. No apparent life at the blacksmith shop; none at the store. Not even a vehicle on the road, now that the hack had crawled out of view towards Sunrise Cove.
“Goodness me!” she said again, and this time she jumped up, startling Prince from his nap. “Maybe there is a spell cast over all this place,” she went on. “Everybody has been put to sleep, just like in a fairy story. I don’t know whether a little girl who isn’t asleep can wake ’em up, or whether it must be a prince.
“Why, Princey,” she added, looking at the dog, “maybe it will be you that wakes ’em up. Anyway, let’s go and see if we can find somebody that’s alive.”
They went out of the yard together and took the dusty road towards the town. They passed the broad front of the church, its windows like so many blind eyes, and the little girl peered timidly over the rusty railing into the neglected churchyard, where many of the headstones were moss-grown and toppling.
“This is just the very deadest place,” murmured Carolyn May. “And I guess these folks buried here aren’t much quieter than the live folks. Oh, dear me! these folks here at The Corners don’t look up to brighter things any more than the folks that are under ground. Why, maybe I’ll get that way if I stay here! And I know Papa Cameron wouldn’t approve of that!”
She sighed, and trudged on in the dust. The perspiration began to trickle down her pink face. The powdery dust rose from beneath her feet and was drifted over the wayside grass and weeds by the fretful breeze.
Prince paced on by her side, his nose wrinkling at the strange odours the breeze brought to his nostrils. A toad hopped suddenly out of its ambuscade beside the path, and Prince jumped.
“Don’t touch the toad, Princey,” said the little girl. “You know we learned about toads at school—and how good they are. And there was one in Central Park—don’t you ’member?”