文档介绍：A Bird Of Bagdad(O·Henry)
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Without a doubt much of the spirit and genius of the Caliph Harun Al Rashid
descended to the Margrave August Michael von Paulsen Quigg.
Quigg's restaurant is in Fourth Avenue - that street that the city seems to have
forgotten in its growth. Fourth Avenue - born and bred in the Bowery - staggers
northward full of good resolutions.
Where it crosses Fourteenth Street it struts for a brief moment proudly in the
glare of the museums and cheap theatres. It may yet e a fit mate for its
high-born sister boulevard to the west, or its roaring, polyglot, broad-waisted
cousin to the east. It passes Union Square; and here the hoofs of the dray
horses seem to thunder in unison, recalling the tread of marching hosts -
Hooray! But e the silent and terrible mountains - buildings square as
forts, high as the clouds, shutting out the sky, where thousands of slaves bend
over desks all day. On the ground floors are only little fruit shops and laundries
and book shops, where you see copies of "Littell's Living Age" and G. W. M.
Reynold's novels in the windows. And next - poor Fourth Avenue! - the street
glides into a mediaeval solitude. On each side are shops devoted to
"Antiques."
Let us say it is night. Men in rusty armor stand in the windows and menace the
hurrying cars with raised, rusty iron gauntlets. Hauberks and helms,
blunderbusses, Cromwellian breastplates, matchlocks, creeses, and the
swords and daggers of an army of dead-and-gone gallants gleam dully in the
ghostly light. Here and there from a corner saloon (lit with Jack-o'-lanterns or
phosphorus), stagger forth shuddering, home-bound citizens, nerved by the
tankards within to their fearsome journey adown that eldrich avenue lined with
the bloodstained weapons of the fighting dead. What street could live inclosed
by these mortuary relics, and trod by these spectral citizens in whose sunken