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January.

It refuses to obey the clichés this year. December did not provide a white Christmas, and now there is no lingering snow on the city pavements. The clouds above the jagged skyline are threatening, but it is too warm to snow, and yet there is no real warmth. Neither is there a blustering wind, or frost-rimmed windows. There is instead a sunless lack of cheer, an overall impression of solemn monochromatic gray.

The gray descends from the curving sky in motion, covers the motionless city buildings, gray themselves with the soot of centuries, extends to the gray concrete pavements and the deeper gray of asphalt streets, becomes a part of the residents themselves, a teeming gray mass that moves along the city streets as though suspended in melancholy, captured in the doldrums of January. This is the first month. It contains thirty-one days, year in and

year out. There will be no future days or years for the man lying against the basement wall.

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