Short Stories and Essays | Page 4

of them. D.W.]

LITERATURE AND LIFE--Short Stories and Essays
by William Dean Howells
CONTENTS: Worries of a Winter Walk Summer Isles of Eden Wild
Flowers of the Asphalt A Circus in the Suburbs A She Hamlet The
Midnight Platoon The Beach at Rockaway Sawdust in the Arena At a

Dime Museum American Literature in Exile The Horse Show The
Problem of the Summer Aesthetic New York Fifty-odd Years Ago
From New York into New England The Art of the Adsmith The
Psychology of Plagiarism Puritanism in American Fiction The What
and How in Art Politics in American Authors Storage "Floating down
the River on the O-hi-o"

WORRIES OF A WINTER WALK
The other winter, as I was taking a morning walk down to the East
River, I came upon a bit of our motley life, a fact of our piebald
civilization, which has perplexed me from time to time, ever since, and
which I wish now to leave with the reader, for his or her more
thoughtful consideration.

I.
The morning was extremely cold. It professed to be sunny, and there
was really some sort of hard glitter in the air, which, so far from being
tempered by this effulgence, seemed all the stonier for it. Blasts of
frigid wind swept the streets, and buffeted each other in a fury of
resentment when they met around the corners. Although I was passing
through a populous tenement-house quarter, my way was not hindered
by the sports of the tenement-house children, who commonly crowd
one from the sidewalks; no frowzy head looked out over the
fire-escapes; there were no peddlers' carts or voices in the road-way;
not above three or four shawl- hooded women cowered out of the little
shops with small purchases in their hands; not so many tiny girls with
jugs opened the doors of the beer saloons. The butchers' windows were
painted with patterns of frost, through which I could dimly see the
frozen meats hanging like hideous stalactites from the roof. When I
came to the river, I ached in sympathy with the shipping painfully atilt
on the rocklike surface of the brine, which broke against the piers, and
sprayed itself over them like showers of powdered quartz.
But it was before I reached this final point that I received into my
consciousness the moments of the human comedy which have been an
increasing burden to it. Within a block of the river I met a child so
small that at first I almost refused to take any account of her, until she

appealed to my sense of humor by her amusing disproportion to the pail
which she was lugging in front of her with both of her little mittened
hands. I am scrupulous about mittens, though I was tempted to write of
her little naked hands, red with the pitiless cold. This would have been
more effective, but it would not have been true, and the truth obliges
me to own that she had a stout, warm-looking knit jacket on. The
pail-which was half her height and twice her bulk-was filled to
overflowing with small pieces of coal and coke, and if it had not been
for this I might have taken her for a child of the better classes, she was
so comfortably clad. But in that case she would have had to be fifteen
or sixteen years old, in order to be doing so efficiently and responsibly
the work which, as the child of the worse classes, she was actually
doing at five or six. We must, indeed, allow that the early
self-helpfulness of such children is very remarkable, and all the more
so because they grow up into men and women so stupid that, according
to the theories of all polite economists, they have to have their
discontent with their conditions put into their heads by malevolent
agitators.
From time to time this tiny creature put down her heavy burden to rest;
it was, of course, only relatively heavy; a man would have made
nothing of it. From time to time she was forced to stop and pick up the
bits of coke that tumbled from her heaping pail. She could not consent
to lose one of them, and at last, when she found she could not make all
of them stay on the heap, she thriftily tucked them into the pockets of
her jacket, and trudged sturdily on till she met a boy some years older,
who planted himself in her path and stood looking at her, with his
hands in his pockets. I do not say he was a bad boy, but I could see in
his furtive eye that she was a sore temptation to him. The chance to
have fun with her by upsetting her bucket, and scattering her