And so, on the other side of the world, the son of the Dragon came to
his own and realized the dreams of a glory he had missed.
"HUMORESQUE"
By FANNIE HURST
From _Cosmopolitan_
On either side of the Bowery, which cuts through like a drain to catch
its sewage, Every Man's Land, a reeking march of humanity and humidity,
steams with the excrement of seventeen languages, flung in _patois_ from
tenement windows, fire-escapes, curbs, stoops, and cellars whose walls
are terrible and spongy with fungi.
By that impregnable chemistry of race whereby the red blood of the
Mongolian and the red blood of the Caucasian become as oil and water in
the mingling, Mulberry Street, bounded by sixteen languages, runs its
intact Latin length of push-carts, clothes-lines, naked babies, drying
vermicelli; black-eyed women in rhinestone combs and perennially big
with child; whole families of button-hole makers, who first saw the
blue-and-gold light of Sorrento, bent at home work around a single gas
flare; pomaded barbers of a thousand Neapolitan amours. And then, just
as suddenly, almost without osmosis and by the mere stepping-down from
the curb, Mulberry becomes Mott Street, hung in grill-work balconies,
the mouldy smell of poverty touched up with incense. Orientals, whose
feet shuffle and whose faces are carved out of satinwood. Forbidden
women, their white, drugged faces behind upper windows. Yellow children,
incongruous enough in Western clothing.
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