Street-Corner Studies [pp. 636-637]

M3OTION BY RAIL.-STREET-CORNER STUTDIES.
whiskey, and cards, should be
banished by solemn ukase or
bull of railroad pope. I have
observed that the playing of
cards, and more particularly of
the idiotic game of euchrewhist affords some play for the
intellect; euchre none whatever
-gives to the hat a nauseous
set back, and to the cigar a
tusk-like or unicornish upward
tilt, not to be borne with any
degree of patience by any sane
human being. I regard euchre
as the resource of dementia. I
believe that it imparts a ruffianly cock to the player's cap, a ll
scoundrelly aspect to his physi -\
ognomy, and a villanous odor
to his cigar. It cannot be played
by the true lover of the pipe or
of the genuine Havana. It cor-
rugates the brow. It affects the'
eyesight. It causes baldness of
the head. It provokes a thirst
for strong drink, and it inter-
feres seriously with the timehonored terminology of cards.
It tells of "right and left
bowers." Now, a knave is
not a bower. There is a species of anchor called bower,
but a knave, or jack, is not an
anchor. There is no resemblance in size or
appearance. The material is wholly different
-one is of iron and the other of pasteboard.
Their shapes are entirely dissimilar. I fail to
see the likeness either to a bower of trees or
shrubs, or to a bower anchor. But if bower,
why right bower, why left bower? No sufficient answer has ever been given to this question, and it is fair to presume that none ever
will. I say the game has no scientific basis, and
that there is no sense in right and left bower.
Bower, forsooth! The name is exceedingly
unpleasing and illogical. Can a man, I mean
an actual man, " throw a bower," a real bower, or take up a bower, or "go it alone," with
a bower? I do not believe it; or, if he could,
the spectacle would be a very foolish one.
No, this thing of "euchring" a man or a
couple of men has been carried a little too far
on the cars. Catholic in my tastes, I admit
that even cards may be made a profitable
amusement. Our sports should conform to
the age in which we live. Let the cards consist of granite, gneiss, hornblende, trap, felspar, mica, sandstone, etc., etc., illustrative
of the geology of the country through which
the train is passing, and to each card affix a
value proportioned to its period in the past
-granite being ace, and so on down to mud,
which may represent the deuce. Thus, I
conceive, the game may be made instructive
without the use of either a right or left bow er, and without "going it alone," or the
"euchring "of any man, however geologically
ignorant.
But, soft! the train is being slowed, and
we approach Doughnutville or Crullerton. I
know the place full well. Ten minutes here
for cormorant practice —for choking, gorging,
gobbling, guzzling; and the American, eu-i
chred or uneuchred, rushes, like an icthyosaur
THE POP-CORN MAN.
or pterodactyl, to his prey. Here is transformation of force with a vengeance. The
train is still, but the beasts-the ravening
beasts-are busier than ever. Cup and platter, coffee and pie, fingers and fork, coffee,
pie, sandwich, pie, pie, coffee, always pie,
coffee ever, eternal coffee and sempiternal
pie-a death-struggle for pie, a warfare for
coffee, fast, furious, short, sharp, decisive,
demoniacally quick and instantly determined.
I remark that, while there may be some
proportion between the human stomach and
the tank of the tender, the (esophagus is
constructed on a widely-different model from
the canvas tube which carries water into the
tender, and that the walls of the stomach are
not made of sheet-iron or boiler-plate, riveted,
as is the case with the tender. Hence I am
unable to perceive the rationale of timing
people as tenders are timed. Canvas tubes
do not swallow —no more do Americans;
they gulp, and food goes down in a continuous stream as nearly as the structure of
the fauces will admit. Still, canvas and sheetiron have an immense advantage, which does
not enter into the calculations of the computers of time-tables.
Come, give us ten minutes more at Crullerton, and make it up in additional speed.
Allow us slowly to eat our food, carefully cut
beforehand into exact dodecahedrons, and
then, at least, one of the miseries of motion
by rail will be wanting.
STREET-CORNER STUDIES.
ALL things considered, I think talk is
manliest in the open air; more refined
by the fireside of course it is, but strained of
some of its arterial blood. The free sky in
vites to frankness- not the kind
of frankness, perhaps, that would
lead you to tell the name of your
p/ft} 2 sweetheart, but that kind which
gets into your full lungs and talks
out your nature for you, truer
and better than you know. The
least autobiographical of men
will often leave a trail into his
past by the merest chip of a
phrase, as he hurries by you in
the street; while your ordinary
mortal is always dropping bits
of text according to himself, by
which you can read him back ward, as the good Hebrews do
their prophets; or catch-words
by which you fancy you can
read forward into next week of
a lifetime, and even beyond.
Street-talk bounds from one em phatic word to another; out side of your vernacular you can
rarely fill up the blank spaces.
So that the real romance of the
pavements is a sort of fugitive
dramatic poetry that you must
be born to. And the pure luxury
,-'> ~ of listening to it is felt in its high est, I think, by one who has lived
long abroad, and who, returned
to the habitat of his own lan guage, is forever experiencing the
fresh surprise that he can catch the meaning
of the merest toucl;-and-goes of conversation
That, I am free to say, is how I got in the
way of listening on street-corners. It may
not be the best morality, but I could not
help it now if I tried; and then it is, after
all, as ice-cream and many insipider things
would be, if it were only wicked to indulge
in them-it is all the pleasanter for the immoral courage it draws upon.
Now what, for instance, could have been
more dramatic than the little scene, just ten
seconds long, that flashed upon me the other
day as I was waiting for my suburban car?
Two little girls, neither of them over seven
or eight years old, came marching along
abreast; they had pug noses; they wore;
Irishy hoods, the shabbiest kind of dresses,
pieces of shawls, holey stockings, through
which their dirty little red legs glared at intervals; shoes which retained scarce a memory of their first cowhide youth and officethe merest reveries of shoes. Well, just in
front of these little creatures walked a lady
in a velvet cloak, and with her hair all
crimped, and hanging dishevelled down her
back. Said one little girl to the other, pulling her piece of a shawl daintily over her
shoulders, and pointing at this reckless coiffure, as they passed me, "It's all the fashion
to wear oUR hair that way now!"
Of course the genius of that speech is all
condensed into that one word "our." Your
playwright or story-teller might have thought
of every thing but that. If one might put all
speeches through seven stages, as Touchstone
does giving the lie, we would here have an
instance of the dramatic direct. Now, much
of street dialogue is only dramatic suggestive
-verbal pennants, as you might say, which
catch the wind of a better story above and
636
[JUNE, 8,