Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/181

 merely smiles and talks about Hammerstein and the musical lasses.

The greatest and most wonderful thing in the world is a baby. Not so much for what he is, though that's astounding enough, but for his chemical and explosive possibilities. He's a marvelous little machine, an infant dynamo, and he has juice enough in his storage battery for a seventy-two-hour run, but the moment that is gone he goes out like a blown candle, muy pronto, unless he has connected up with his surroundings.

"I like this very much myself," he will explain. "It's great stuff. I wish I could use it. That part about the bobbed hair is a scream. But none of it would mean anything to the farmer in Iowa. Won't you show me something again that isn't quite so sophisticated?"

In those far-off times, in the city where I lived, all the hod-carriers were colored men—usually great, shiny fellows with immense knots of muscles in their legs and arms. The Irish had already become lawyers, city detectives, saloonkeepers, gang bosses, and Todsaufer for breweries. These colored men, in summer, liked to work with their chests bare. Swarming up the ladders in long files, each with his heavy hod on his shoulder, they made