and find Ludlow reappearing just above Leary's Book Store.
Here it is that our dear Ludlow street finds its mission and meaning in life. From the tall-browed facade of the Mercantile Library it has caught a taste for literature and against the north wall of Leary's it indulges itself to the full. Perhaps you would think it a grimy little alley as it twists blithely round Leary's, but to us it is a porchway of Paradise. How many hours we have dallied under that little penthouse shelter mulling over the ten-cent shelves! All the rumors and echoes of letters find their way to Ludlow street sooner or later. We can lay our ear to those battered rows of books as to a whorled conch shell and hear the solemn murmur of the vast ocean of literature. There we may meet the proud argosies or the humble derelicts of that ocean for ten cents.
Yes, they all come to Ludlow street in the end. We have found Wentworth's Arithmetic there, old foe of our youth; and George Eliot, and Porter (Jane) and Porter (Gene Stratton). There used to be a complete set of Wilkie Collins, bound in blue buckram, at the genteel end of the street among the twenty-five centers. We were buying them, one by one (that was before the days of thrift stamps), when some plutocrat came along and kidnapped the whole bunch. He was an undiscerning plutocrat, because he took the second volume of "The Woman in White" while we were
