Page:The Voice of the City (1908).djvu/153

 the dirty grass like a rabbit? ’Tis like Jerome to stir up trouble wid small matters like this instead of’

“‘Whist!’ says Officer Reagan on the sidewalk, rapping with his club. ‘’Tis not Jerome. ’Tis by order of the Polis Commissioner. Turn out every one of yez and hike yerselves to the park.’

“Now, ’twas a peaceful and happy home that all of us had in them same Beersheba Flats. The O’Dowds and the Steinowitzes and the Callahans and the Cohens and the Spizzinellis and the McManuses and the Spiegelmayers and the Joneses—all nations of us, we lived like one big family together. And when the hot nights come along we kept a line of childher reaching from the front door to Kelly’s on the corner, passing along the cans of beer from one to another without the trouble of running after it. And with no more clothing on than is provided for in the statutes, sitting in all the windies, with a cool growler in every one, and your feet out in the air, and the Rosenstein girls singing on the fire-escape of the sixth floor, and Patsy Rourke’s flute going in the eighth, and the ladies calling each other synonyms out the windies, and now and then a breeze sailing in over Mister Depew’s Central—I tell you the Beersheba Flats was a summer resort that made the Catskills look like a hole in the ground. With his person full of beer and his feet out the windy and his old woman frying