5

In the mornings at daylight, mothers take their babies to the water fronts and nurse them on the dock string-pieces and on the rocks in the empty lots. Quiet is there, some space, a kinder air, and the sun coming up over Long Island through the haze cannot be more uncomfortable than the several times heated and used air back in the bricklined street and stuffy rooms.

They fondle the babies in the morning stillness, watching the quiet, changing life on the river. Schooners flap out with the tide, big Fall River boats thump around Hell Gate and shortly the sharp saucy bowed stem-yachts slip by on their way from the Sound to the anchorage off Twenty-second Street.