Harold Titus

“ Illustration: “We got ducks, Mary, and firewood. I got a good job!”
THIS is the story of a house on the river flats of Minneapolis. The flats are at the foot of the bluff which flanks the Mississippi and lie downstream from where the blank walls of grain elevators rise like fortresses. The district is roughly bounded by two long-legged bridges which step from bluff to bluff in prodigious strides. ”

“ The people there are apart from the city which makes noises overhead. They have their ducks and their pigeons and their children and their church—a yellow, square one—and their troubles and homes all to themselves, and are rather indifferent to the River except when it invades their property. ”

“ Cleanliness and thrift seem to be characteristic of the neighborhood.
There are no streets, just lanes, with swept paths for sidewalks. The ways up and down are little more than zigzagging trails, and few outsiders invade the flats. ”

“ Many houses squat down there, homes of poor people, erected at little cost and possible for their occupants solely because to secure the land on which they set, it is necessary to bargain only with the River.
During the greater portion of the year the stream flows swiftly along and does not bother the people who live on terrain which by the law of might belongs to it. ”

“ Then they scramble up the bluff with their portable belongings and wait until the water recedes, when stoically they clean up again and resume their wonted ways. Sometimes they lose heavily, but they accept the risk, because were it not for the cheapness of the places down there, they would, it is likely, be living huddled somewhere up dark stairways.
That was why Joe and Mary Tomek bought a house on the flats. Joe had been only eight months in America when he first beheld Mary. ”