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The wind idles briefly before a jazz club, listening to this new ht It thrills to the bleat of horns, the percussive piano strides born of blues and ragtied excitement of the city’s skyline

On the Bowery, in the ornate carcass of a for The contestants, young girls and their fellas, hold one another up, determined to make their mark, to bite back at the dreams sold to them in newspaper advertisements and on the radio They have sores on their feet but stars in their eyes Farther uptown, the Great White Way, nahts, ee-door Johnnies wait in the alleys, hoping for a gliraph from one of Broadway’s many stars It is a ti, and the young burn with secret ambition

The wind takes it all in with indifference It is only the wind It will not become a radio star or a captain of industry It will not run for office or fall in love with Douglas Fairbanks or sing the songs of Tin Pan Alley, songs of longing and regret and good tihterhouses on Fourteenth Street, past the unfortunates selling themselves in darkened alleys Nearby, Lady Liberty hoists her torch in the harbor, a beacon to all who come to these shores to escape persecution or famine or hopelessness For this is the land of dreams

The wind swoops over the tenements on Orchard Street, where some of those starry-eyed drea born into squalor and poverty, an uphill cliives a slap to the laundry stretched on lines between tenements, over dirty, broken streets where, even at this hour, hungry children scour the bins for food The wind has existed forever It has seen much in this country of dreams and soap ads, old horrors and bloodshed It has playeda Trail of Tears; it has seen the slave ships release their hu and afraid, into the ports, their only possession a grief they can never lose The as there when President Lincoln fell to an assassin’s bullet It sunpowder at Antietaers to the tall black hats of Puritans It has carried shouts of love, and it has dried tears to salt tracks on more faces than it can number

The wind skitters down the Bowery and swoops up the West Side, hos like the Du Ninth Avenue to warn the bootleggers It swoops along the htlife of Harlereat thinkers, writers, and musicians, until it co boards cover the broken s Rubbish clogs the gutter out front Once upon a time, the house was hoone era, forgotten in the shadow of the city’s growth and prosperity

The door creaks on its hinges The wind enters cautiously It creeps down narrow hallways that twist and turn in dizzying fashion Diseased rooht Doors open onto brick walls A trapdoor gives way to a chute that empties into a vast subterranean cha room It stinks still: of blood, urine, evil, and a fear so dark it has become as much a part of the house as the wood and nails and rot

So terrible, and the wind, which knows evil well, shrinks fronificent tall buildings that pro but blue skies, of the future, of industry and prosperity; the future, which does not believe in the evil of the past If the ere a sentinel, it would send up the alar of terrors to come But it is only the wind, and it knoell that no one listens to its cries

Deep in the cellar of the dilapidated house, a furnace coh of a dying low e earthen toer of hty John has come home And he has work to do

EVIE O’NEILL, ZENITH, OHIO

Evie O’Neill pressed the sagging ice bag to her throbbing forehead and cursed the hour It was noon, but itin her skull For the past twenty uht’s party at the Zenith Hotel Her drinking had beenwith the unfortunate frolic in the town fountain And the trouble that caonna be a real beast of a day, and how Her head beat out require