--Arthur Symons: _Constantinople: An Impression_ ("Harper's").
2. The boy was advancing up the road, carrying a half-filled pail of milk.
He was a child of perhaps ten years, exceedingly frail and thin, with a
drawn, waxen face, and sick, colorless lips and ears. On his head he wore
a thick plush cap, and coarse, heavy shoes upon his feet. A faded coat,
too long in the arms, drooped from his shoulders, and long, loose overalls
of gray jeans broke and wrinkled about his slender ankles.
--George Kibbe Turner: _Across the State_ ("McClure's").
3. They met few people abroad, even on passing from the retired
neighborhood of the House of the Seven Gables into what was ordinarily the
more thronged and busier portion of the town. Glistening sidewalks, with
little pools of rain, here and there, along their unequal surface;
umbrellas displayed ostentatiously in the shop windows, as if the life of
trade had concentered itself in that one article; wet leaves of the
horse-chestnut or elm trees, torn off untimely by the blast, and scattered
along the public way; an unsightly accumulation of mud in the middle of
the street, which perversely grew the more unclean for its long and
laborious washing;--these were the more definable points of a very somber
picture. In the way of movement, and human life, there was the hasty
rattle of a cab or coach, its driver protected by a water-proof cap over
his head and shoulders; the forlorn figure of an old man, who seemed to
have crept out of some subterranean sewer, and was stooping along the
kennel, and poking the wet rubbish with a stick, in quest of rusty nails;
a merchant or two, at the door of the post office, together with an
editor, and a miscellaneous politician, awaiting a dilatory mail; a few
visages of retired sea captains at the window of an insurance office,
looking out vacantly at the vacant street, blaspheming at the weather, and
fretting at the dearth as well of public news as local gossip.
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