V
FLOYD BEGINS AT THE BOTTOM
In Avalon the very rich and the miserably poor lived upon the same street. It entered the town at the western end low down by the river, skirting the foundries and mills; it emerged at the eastern end upon a hilltop, which was covered with great houses and wide gardens and lawns. Floyd, looking out of the trolley car, saw an almost precipitous slope ascending on one side, descending on the other, with houses flattening themselves against the wall, seeming to hang on one another's shoulders, boosting, clinging hard for toe-hold,—some with only the top story peering above the sidewalk, others mounting for two stories in front and dropping down for four behind. They all seemed temporary, as if a gust of wind would sweep them down in an avalanche of rotten wood and broken brick. Below them were the abysmal iron mills, in a continuous, three-mile line. At this hour the families, having finished supper, were strewn along the sidewalks or crowded together upon the doorsteps; the children playing hopscotch or dancing to the tune of a hand-organ, the women resting and gossiping, the men smoking their pipes, reading newspapers, sitting most of them coatless and collarless. They had brought chairs out upon the sidewalk and were tipped back against the house walls, or against their picket fences, for there were some who had reserved and fenced in a few feet of slanting, weedy green. The young men loafed in front of the saloons. Along this street of squalid, swarming life the car traveled with incessantly clanging gong; then it climbed a hill and drew away from the river and the iron works, and entered
