Alexanders Bridge
contributor: Eric Lease Morgan (Infomotions, Inc.)
creator: Cather, Willa
date: 0000-00-00
extent: 165096
format: text/plain
language: en
publisher: Wiretap Electronic Text Archive
rights: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/
source: alexbr.txt
subject: alexander
subject: bartley
subject: hilda
subject: time
subject: wilson
subject: standing
subject: row
subject: naked
subject: trees
subject: thin
subject: sunlight
subject: shining
subject: cather
subject: willa
subject: alexanders
subject: bridge
subject: american
subject: literature
type: text
local mirror: cather-alexanders-365.txt
concordance: http://infomotions.com/alex/cgi-bin/concordance.pl
plain html: cather-alexanders-365.htm
sort title: Alexanders Bridge
full text: [pg/etext93/alexb10.txt] Alexander's Bridge by Willa Cather [Cather #3] December, 1993 [Etext #94] Alexander's Bridge by Willa Cather CHAPTER I Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a man of taste who does not very often get to Boston. He had lived there as a student, but for twenty years and more, since he had been Professor of Philosophy in a Western university, he had seldom come East except to take a steamer for some foreign port. Wilson was standing quite still, contemplating with a whimsical smile the slanting street, with its worn paving, its irregular, gravely colored houses, and the row of naked trees on which the thin sunlight was still shining. The gleam of the river at the foot of the hill made him blink a little, not so much because it was too bright as because he found it so pleasant. The few passers-by glanced at him unconcernedly, and even the children who hurried along with their school-bags under their arms seemed to find it perfectly natural that a tall brown gentleman should be standing there, looking up through his glasses at the gray housetops. The sun sank rapidly; the silvery light had faded from the bare boughs and the watery twilight was setting in when Wilson at last walked down the hill, descending into cooler and cooler depths of grayish shadow. His nostril, long unused to it, was quick to detect the smell of wood smoke in the air, blended with the odor of moist spring earth and the saltiness that came up the river with the tide. He crossed Charles Street between jangling street cars and shelving lumber drays, and after a moment of uncertainty wound into Brimmer Street. The street was quiet, deserted, and hung with a thin bluish haze. He had already fixed his sharp eye upon the house which he reasoned should be his objective point, when he noticed a woman approaching rapidly from the opposite direction. Always an interested observer of wo…