IT WAS two days before Christmas, and Dove Dulcet had come down town
to have lunch with me. As he had arrived rather early, we were taking a
little stroll round the bright, windy streets before our meal,
enjoying the colour and movement of the scene. We stopped by St. Paul's
churchyard to note the curious contrast of the old chocolate spire
relieved against the huge glittering shaft of the Woolworth Building. At
the noon hour St. Paul's stands in the dark shadow of the great cliffs
to the south, while the Woolworth pinnacle leaps up like a spearhead
into the golden vacancy of day-long sunshine.
“Saint Paul in the shadow, Saint Frank in the sun,” said Dove with
gentle irony. “It seems to prove that ten cents put in the cash register
gets nearer Heaven than ten cents dropped in the collection plate.”
When Dove is philosophical, he is always full of quaint matter, but
I was hardly heeding what he said. My eye had been caught by a crowd
gathered at the corner of Church Street. Over the heads of the throng was
a winking spark of light that flashed this way and that as though spun
from a turning mirror.
“Let's go and see what's doing,” I said. My poet friend is always
docile, and he followed me down Fulton Street.
“It looks to me like a silk hat,” he said.
And so it was. On the corner of the pavement stood a tall, stout, and
very well-nourished man with a ruddy face, wearing shabby but still
presentable cutaway coat and gray trousers, and crowned by a steep
and glittering stovepipe hat which twinkled like a heliograph in the
dazzling winter glare. But, most amazing, when we elbowed a passage
through the jocular crowd, we saw that this personable individual was
wearing, instead of an overcoat, two large sandwich boards vigorously
lettered as follows: