It is a cosmopolitan community, too--as
cosmopolitan as it can be and still retain its Senegambian motif.
Negroes from Haiti, Jamaica, Salvador, Cuba; from Morocco and Senegal;
blue-black negroes from the Pacific; ebony negroes from the South;
brown, tan, yellow, and buff negroes from everywhere inhabit San Juan.
Every language from Arabic to Spanish is spoken by these--the
cosmopolites of cosmopolitan San Juan.
_Pussonally_, Mr. Ambrose de Vere Travis spoke only English.
Because he hailed from Galveston, Tex., he spoke it with a Gulf
intonation at once liquid, rich, and musical. He stood six feet five
on his bare soles, so his voice was somewhat reminiscent of the
Vatican organ.
Ambrose was twenty-four years old. Our story finds him a New Yorker
of three years' standing, all of which he had spent as a dweller on
San Juan Hill. Originally the giant Mr. Travis had served as furnace
tender in the subterraneous portions of the Swalecliffe Arms
apartments, that turreted edifice in the Eighties that frowns across
at the Palisades from Riverside Drive. But his size and the size of
his smile had won for Ambrose the coveted and uniformed position of
door-man, a post at which he served with considerable success and
the incidental tips.
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