" Nor could he speak of it
without beginning to wish to take you out to see it--not merely for a
motor ride along the top of it, either. No, his hospitality did not
stop there. When _he_ invited you to a sewer he invited you _in_. And if
you went in with him, no one could make you come out until you wanted
to.
As he told my companion and me of the three great tubes, the walks
beside them, the conduits for gas and electricity, and all the other
wonders of the place, I began to wish that we might go with him, for,
though we have been to a good many places together, this was something
new: it was the first time we had ever been invited to drop into a sewer
and make ourselves as much at home as though we lived there.
My companion, however, seemed unsympathetic to the project.
"Sewers, you know," he said, when I taxed him with indifference, "have
come to have a very definite place in both the literary and the graphic
arts. How do you propose to treat it?"
"What do you mean?"
"When you write about it: Are you going to write about it as a realist,
a mystic, or a romanticist?"
I said I didn't know.
"Well, a man who is going to write of a sewer _ought_ to know," he told
me severely. "You're not up to sewers yet. They're too big for you. If
you take my advice you'll keep out of the sewers for the present and
stick to the gutters.
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