Places and Persons

...He seems to have had a certain talent for organization...

...When she grows up, that child will be a newspaper reporter...

...The old umbrellamender has hardly finished his task and his story when a tinny tinkling sound comes through the alley...

...and once it was gay with red-jacketed Jockos and painted musicboxes...

...There is poetry and romance in such an occupation...

...When the months begin to have R's again, the barrel has oysters in the shell...

...and for months there has been no piano man...

...and the cry is echoed from neighboring streets, where other venerable daytons and fat horses are doing a tranquil business...

...By his side on a campstool is a covered basket...

...Who would care to sit on an office stool or keep a shop or put in bolt 19 in one of Henry Ford's factories...

...For years I have passed him almost every day, but I have never seen him sell anything...

...This man's balloons are always of two colors only: crimson and silver...

...Never tired, never dull, never, oh, never in a hurry, they push banana carts, drive mules, grind at street pianos or hurdy-gurdys, smiling and singing from morning till night...

...A stranger might die of violating such principles, but not a native Baltimorean...

...Crabs...

...His dance hall on Broadway was a rendezvous for the Bohemians of Baltimore...

...The driver pauses after every long-drawn cry, but not to take breath as I once supposed...

...I wonder why he chooses just those...

...I had thought the last scissors-grinder had been gathered to his fathers...

...He is but a survivor of a civilization which is no longer tolerated...

...Our street music, dancing, drinking, would be the better for his happy hand...

...the other is the mother of nine children—all boys...

...but the food is invariably excellent...

...It works with a treadle, rather like that of a sewing-machine...

...Certainly it is done in Baltimore with as pleasing and picturesque a grace as ever I saw in my life...

...Now that the scissors-grinder has two customers he feels himself settled for business...

...The landlord did a thriving business, renting hand-organs by the week...

...but the fact that he does so choose sets him apart...

...He is not ordinary: he is selling toy ballons because he likes toy balloons...

...Most of these street vendors are Irishmen, Bohemians, Italians...

...Still, the hurdy-gurdy business is falling off...

...What could be more rare, more distinguished ? I know only two other people who are doing what they are doing because they like it...

...But as soon as the southern fruit boats begin to come up the bay in the early spring, the orange man gets an assistant, a lanky colored boy, who walks beside the fat brown horse, carrying a basket of berry boxes...

...On certain days in the week he grinds knives and scissors for the housewives of our street...

...This brought a large audience...

...He blows two blasts on the brass bugle slung across his shoulder in the manner of Robin Hood (scissors-grinders carry bugles...

...Naw, suh...

...Naw, suh, ef'n you eat dat, you wouldn' live ter git home...

...Besides the usual handorgan, slung on a heavy stick across one shoulder of a mustachioed Sicilian pirate, to balance the chattering monkey on the other, there was the piano on two wheels, worked with a crank...

...At one time, they say, Baltimore had musicbox factories...

...Only the little tomboy dares approach within question distance...

...Negro waiters, however, at restaurants, still refuse ice cream after crabs...

...Their faces are reddened and bronzed from exposure...

...They grew in Virginia, perhaps, and not on the "Shore...

...One man passed the tambourine while the other turned the crank...

...I bring you jis plain ice, 'thout no cream...

...There was the larger street piano, too, with bass drum, kettle drum, triangle and cymbals...

...It is pleasant to find anywhere in this time-ridden world an order of human beings who refuse to be enslaved to regular hours and routine tasks, yet manage to earn a living while taking their time from the sun...

...He is listening for an answering yodel from the street above...

...when those are exhausted, he must begin over...

...He sets it up on its single leg and turns the crank...

...The first tune is O Sole Mio...

...It is better to drive a watermelon wagon on Saint Paul Street...

...All the year round we have the banana man with his green pushcart, his piratical mustache and red handkerchief, his machine-gun cry, "Get a banan...

...they must have company, if only at city-block intervals...

...Many old Baltimore ladies of uncertain income and undoubted skill in cookery have opened tea-rooms in their homes...

...They cannot work or play alone...

...He would be shoved aside, as he and his like are always being shoved aside, except in kindly, conservative old cities like Charleston and New Orleans and Baltimore, where these little brothers of business are valued as picturesque survivals of a dignified leisure...

...He seems to have been a picturesque and popular person, with a happy hand in mixing drinks...

...A little later, in the mornings and late afternoons, a "spring wagon" with a big yellow umbrella above its pine board seat follows its melancholy mule up and down the city...

...Often, when I am walking home from the university, I see an Italian selling toy balloons just where Wyman Park joins the Johns Hopkins campus...

...Strawbu'ees...

...it is three years since I have seen a monkey...

...Perhaps it can't—outside Charleston and New Orleans and Baltimore, where time stands still withal and living is an art, not a utilitarian enterprise...

...To a man like that our life would seem very drab...

...If Galsworthy's old bootmaker had come to Baltimore he need not have starved to death: he could have made an excellent living by soliciting custom at those doors, like the London and Manchester doors he had left at home...

...There he goes with his musicbox...

...The scissors-grinder values the patronage of these old ladies...

...For a penniless wanderer what task could be more heartening than selling toy balloons—crimson and silver ones...

...At the Fallsway on Charles Street, this side of Union Station, an old Negro in a spotless white apron leans against the parapet...

...but his slow old fingers would be of no use in a factory or a mill...

...but in Baltimore there are many survivors of that blessed day when advertising by modern methods was unknown...

...This man is an honest, careful workman...

...He always begins at the Green Lattice, Miss Sutherland's tiny tea-room in the basement of her house...

...He has only four tunes...

...One is a professor of Romance languages, the happiest man in the world, I believe...

...Miss Rattee does not like a parcel of brats to soil her freshly-scrubbed white marble steps...

...All over the city one finds these little brothers of the busy...

...The next will be Silva Tredi Monigo—or what Tony means by those very Italian-sounding syallables...

...High above this mellow cry comes a "Cherries...

...Ripe, red cherries...

...From under the napkin show the red claws of steamed crabs...

...This boy is hawking flat baskets of morellos...

...The others are content: Life is very pleasant, brother, in the dust and the sun and the rain...

...Perhaps he would be a movie director or operate a wholesale bootleggery...

...The fruit vendors are the most picturesque of these licensed vagabonds...

...One of them was operated by Colonel Shimek, mayor of Bohemia...

...from a mulatto boy imperfectly trained in the mellifluous quavers of the older Negroes...

...The pale green round ones seem to have vanished...

...When the watermelon wagon has a boy and a weedpiled barrel behind, it means crabs, and the yodel takes on variations: "Cra-a-a-bs, soft crabs, cra-a-a-bsl" or "Hard crabs, alive, alive-oh...

...comes the echo, as another spring wagon, another yellow umbrella, another melancholy mule crawls over the crossing...

...They would rather measure cloth in some dim enclosed place...

...He helped distribute hurdy-gurdys and street pianos all over the South...

...Some of them are oddly furnished...

...A burly Negro, half asleep on the board, cries some indistinguishable jargon ending with, "Watahmillin, red to de rine—all red...

...Old Miss Rattee from the tall red brick house on the corner sends out her little black maid with an invisible pair of scissors to be ground...

...Now the hotel is deserted, and only a broken hurdygurdy flung under a shed in the courtyard bears witness to its former gaiety...

...Strawbu'ees...

...It seems that not so long ago Baltimore had a hotel for hurdy-gurdy men...

...By some racial irony the freedom that is life to the born vagabond is slavery to them...

...It still stands, in East Baltimore...

...Even at Lexington Market there are beggars with concertinas and banjos and "mouth harps...

...It is the hand-bell tied to the frame of the scissorsgrinder's little portable work-bench...

...When the nurses begin to take their charges home, the balloon man does a thriving business ; and a bobbing procession of sunset-lighted bubbles moves along the barberry hedge of the campus...

...Most of the carters are Negroes...

...And he would have been happy here, doing what he liked to do, in the way he liked to do it...

...Red, red, all red...

...their trousers are patched...

...Get a banan...

...All the year round we have the orange man with his venerable dayton and his fat brown horse...

...What would he do, I wonder, if he were living today...

...but they look happier than many of their betters...

...Behind him in a bed of yellow straw lie the long green melons, shaped like dirigibles...

...certan perquisites go along with it...

...It is better to wheel a street piano among the school children or blow a scissors-grinder's bugle...

...These Negroes are gregarious souls...

...Little boys and colored girls bring custom, but they stand at a discreet distance while they wait, for Miss Rattee is at the window sewing...

...He sets up his tall green wooden frame in the angle of Miss Rattee's white marble steps, slings his bugle over his shoulder, and begins to turn his little emery wheel...

...It is better, in short, to be footsore and a bit ragged than to be slave to a factory boss or a mine foreman, with never a glimpse of the sun...

...The children watch him from a distance...

...But children liked the monkey best of all...

...garbage men, fog-horns, in Baltimore) to announce the fact that he is ready to receive custom...

...For years that old man has stood just there, or sat to rest on the runningboard of some car parked at the curb...

...I can remember when we had three distinct types of perambulating musicboxes...

...he cries in a voice from grand opera...

...There is still Tony, however...

...Baltimore has always shown itself hospitable to street musicians...

...Tony had a monkey once, who used to drink from his cup and sleep in his bosom (I have seen him doing it) ; but little Jocko is dead now, and Tony himself is too old to train another...

...As a matter of fact, the "No R, no oyster" dictum is a superstitution like its companion "No cream with crabs...

...There are a few unhappy Jews, pushing barrows or driving junkcarts...