Great buildings now towered there.
South along Fourth Avenue he would walk, a little man, scarcely five
feet four in height, even with the silk hat and the Prince Albert
coat. His white hair grew long over his collar, and people would
notice that almost more than anything else about him. He may have
weighed between ninety and a hundred pounds. The coat was worn and
shiny, but immaculate. The tall hat was of a certain type and year,
but carefully smoothed and still glossy.
He would pause often, between Nineteenth Street and Eighteenth Street,
peopling the skyscrapers with ghosts of a former day, when houses
and green gardens lined the streets. The passers-by watched him
casually, perhaps as much as any one notices any one else in New York.
He was, in the Fourteenth Street district, a rarer specimen than
Hindus or Mexican medicine-men. Through the ten years since he had
come, pensioned, from Huntington College, he had become a walking
landmark in this region.
He always walked down on the east side of the street, crossing at
Fourteenth Street. He was carefully piloted, and saluted, by the
traffic policeman. It was a bad crossing. Below Fourteenth Street
things looked much more as they had looked when he was young.
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