Strength ripples under his
tattered mackinaw and his stiff looking hands could break the heads of two
men against each other like eggshells while they rained puny blows on his
dull face.
And yet of all the men moving about on the pavement in front of the
Clinton Street bulletin boards it is this shuffling one who is the most
impotent seeming. His figure is the most helpless. It slouches as under a
final defeat. His eyes are the dullest.
He stops at the corner and stands waiting, his head lowered, his shoulders
hunched in and he looks like a man weighed down by a harness.
* * * * *
A curious exile from whose blood has vanished all memory of the country to
which he belongs. A faraway land, ages beyond the sun-warmed roads of
which his Mexican brother dreams as he stands under the bulletin boards. A
land which the ingenuity of the world has left forever behind. This is a
land that once reached over all the seas.
For it was like this that men once looked in an age before the myths of
the Persians and Hindus began to fertilize the animal soul of the race. In
the forests north of the earliest cities of Greece, along the wild coasts
tapering from the Tatar lands to the peninsula of the Basques, men like
this shuffling one once ranged alone and in tribes.
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