It is two o’clock of a sultry summer afternoon in one of those amazingly crowded blocks on the East Side south of Fourteenth Street, which is drowsing out its commonplace existence through the long and wearisome summer. The men of the community, for it may as well be called a community since it involves all that makes a community, and that in a very small space, are away at work or in their small stores, which take up all of the ground floors everywhere. The housewives are doing their shopping in these same stores—groceries, bakeries, meat and fish markets. From the streets which bound this region people are pouring through, a busy host, coming from what sections of the city and the world and going to what sections of the city and the world no one may divine. Wagons¹ rattle², trucks rumble³ by with great, creaking loads, a slot conduit trolley⁴ puts a clattering⁵ car past every fifteen or twenty seconds. The riffraff of life fills it as full as though it were the center of the world. Children, since there is no school now, are playing here. The streets are fairly alive with a noisy company of urchins⁶ who play at London Bridge and My Love’s Lover, and are constantly getting in the way of one another and of every one else who chances to pass this way.