WANTED TO RENT _Small Farm Must Have Fruit and Spring Water_
How many years of repressed yearning may speak behind that modest ambition!
Our own taste for amusement leads us (once luncheon dispatched; you should taste Vesey Street's lentil soup) to the second-hand bookshops. Our imagined castaway, condemned to live on Vesey Street for a term of months, would never need to languish for mental stimulation. Were he devout, there is always St. Paul's, as we have said; and were he atheist, what a collection of Bob Ingersoll's essays greets the faring eye! There is the customary number of copies of "The Pentecost of Calamity"; it seems to the frequenter of second-hand bazaars as though almost everybody who bought that lively booklet in the early days of the war must have sold it again since the armistice. Much rarer, we saw a copy of "Hopkins's Pond," that little volume of agreeable sketches written so long ago by Dr. Robert T. Morris, the well-known surgeon, and if we had not already a copy which the doctor inscribed for us we would certainly have rescued it from this strange exile.
There are only two of the really necessary delights of life that the Vesey Street maroon would miss. There is no movie, there are no doughnuts. We are wondering whether in any part of this city there has sprung up the great doughnut craze that has ravaged Philadelphia in the past months. As soon as prohibition became a certainty, certain astute merchants of the Quaker City devoted themselves to inoculating the public with a taste for these humble fritters, and now they bubble gayly in the windows of Philadelphia's most aristocratic thoroughfare. It is really a startling sight to see Philadelphia lining up for its noonday quota of doughnuts, and the merchants over there have devised an ingenious method of tempting the crowd. A funnel, erected over the frying sinkers, carries the fragrant fumes out through a transom and gushes it into the open air, so that the sniff of doughnuts is perceptible all down the block. There is a fortune waiting on Vesey Street for the man who will establish a doughnut foundry, and we solemnly pledge our own appetite and that of all our friends toward his success.[2]