Just so the iciness that had locked Samuel Lipkind seemed suddenly to
melt in a tornado of sobs that swept him, felled him into a prostration
of the terrible tears that men weep.
At a training-camp--somewhere--from his side of a tent that had flapped
like a captive wing all through a wind-swept night, Lieutenant Lipkind
stirred rather painfully for a final snuggle into the crotch of an elbow
that was stiff with chill and night damp.
Out over the peaked city that had been pitched rather than built, and on
beyond over the frozen stubble of fields, sounded the bugle-cry of the
reveille, which shrills so potently:
I can't get 'em up; I can't get 'em up;
I can't get 'em up in the morn--ing!
EVEN AS YOU AND I
There is an intensity about September noonday on Coney Island, aided and
abetted by tin roofs, metallic facades, gilt domes, looking-glass
fronts, jeweled spires, screaming peanut and frankfurter-stands, which
has not its peculiar kind of equal this side of opalescent Tangiers.
Here the sea air can become a sort of hot camphor-ice to the cheek, the
sea itself a percolator, boiling up against a glass surface. Beneath the
tin roofs of Ocean Avenue the indoor heat takes on the kind of intense
density that is cotton in the mouth and ringing in the ears.
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