Excerpt from The Wine of Life Those feverish flights had both humbled him and inspir ited him. He had barked his shins on the discovery of how little he knew and how much there was to know. He had wakened to find himself only one of an army, a mul titudinous and ever-elbowing army whose mere magni tude left him a little dizzy and homesick. New York, he found, was too intent on the pursuit of its own febrile ends to pay much attention to either him or his trunkful of clay-modellings so carefully wrapped in cheesecloth. But there was much to be seen and learned, and in that vigorous young body was repeated the ancient miracle of the nestling round-eyed confronting the universe, of youth peering hungrily across the first ramparts of the world. Storrow, moist with the heat, pushed the window up as far as it would go. He leaned out across the dusty sill, staring more abstractedly than ever at the scabby and close-shouldered precipices of brick down which cas caded the countless fire-escapes of rusty iron. The metal trellis directly in front of him, smitten by the afternoon sun, made him think of a gridiron. It had been a scorcher, that day, one of the worst of the summer-end hot-spell which was leaving the city as wilted as a let tucc-leaf on a range-shelf. The sun that slanted over water-tanks and walls and roofs, Oriental in their hud dling sky-line, threw creeping blue shadows across the narrow valley of light-wells and back areas twisting like a miniature Grand Canyon between the double row of apartment-hotels and rooming-houses that ran westward from Times Square towards the rattling Elevated of Sixth Avenue. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.