文档介绍：The Voice of the City
The Voice of the City
O Henry
1
The Voice of the City
THE VOICE OF THE CITY
Twenty-five years ago the school children used to chant their lessons.
The manner of their delivery was a singsong recitative between the
utterance of an Episcopal minister and the drone of a tired sawmill. I mean
no disrespect. We must have lumber and sawdust.
I remember one beautiful and instructive little lyric that emanated
from the physiology class. The most striking line of it was this:
"The shin-bone is the long-est bone in the hu-man bod-y."
What an inestimable boon it would have been if all the corporeal and
spiritual facts pertaining to man bad thus been tunefully and logically
inculcated in our youthful minds! But what we gained in anatomy, music
and philosophy was meagre.
The other day I became confused. I needed a ray of light. I turned back
to those school days for aid. But in all the nasal harmonies we whined
forth from those bard benches I could not recall one that treated of the
voice of agglomerated mankind.
In other words, of posite vocal message of massed humanity.
In other words, of the Voice of a Big City.
Now, the individual voice is not lacking. We can understand the song
of the poet, the ripple of the brook, the meaning of the man who wants $5
until next Monday, the inscriptions on the tombs of the Pharaohs, the
language of flowers, the "step lively" of the conductor, and the prelude of
the milk cans at 4 A. M. Certain large-eared ones even assert that they are
wise to the vibrations of the tympanum pro- need by concussion of the air
emanating from Mr. H. James. But who prehend the meaning of
the voice of the city?
I went out for to see.
First, I asked Aurelia. She wore white Swiss and a bat with flowers on
it, and ribbons and ends of things fluttered here and there.
"Tell me," I said, stammeringly, for I have no voice of my own, "what
does this big - er - enormous - er - whopping city say? It mus