MODERN TRAVEL

You stand in West Street and you think Havana,
San Juan, Cristobal, Panama, Valparaiso. You
stand on West Street and think Cherbourg,
Naples, the Piraeus. But now no one is thinking
anything. The gangways may be down, but no
one is on them. Eastward New York's luminosity
lies in layers like masonry of light and darkness
built from the rocks to the night-sky. Westward
lies the beautiful river flowing away to the calm
ocean. And on the wide roadway of the quay
laden lorries rush and crash bearing produce to
the market or away.

I sought a turning on the left and did not find
one till I4th Street. It was a lonely walk. A
drunken man sitting on a bit of paving addressed
me vaguely. He was looking at the heavens with
lack-lustre eye.

" There's only one star left. How fax's that
from here ? " he queried.

I passed an empty " Goulash Kitchen/' passed
standing freight cars, passed the embarkation for
Tampa and Mobile, passed the Boston and Provi-
dence pier, passed the R.M.S.P., passed the
Hoboken Ferry and entered the Gansevoort
market stirring feebly. A black-and-white cat
was squatting in the roadway fastidiously eating
melon.

My turning to the left proved to be the virtual
one of Eleventh Avenue where it starts North near
West i4th Street, and there, like a derelict trolley-
car left stranded on the ooze after the subsidence
of a flood, was a windowed shed with the explicit
word LUNCH printed on it. This was kept by a
lonely Greek.

" Where do you come from ? " I asked, perched
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