The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Two men operate the schooner Quentin watches going under the drawbridge over the Charles: one is "naked to the waist . . . coiling down a line on the fo'c's'le head" and the other is "in a straw hat without any crown . . . at the wheel" (89).

When Quentin boards the first of the Boston streetcars he rides during the day, he notes that it full of "mostly prosperous looking people reading newspapers" (86). Specific passengers in the car include a Negro who is wearing "a derby and shined shoes" and holding "a dead cigar stub" - having to sit next to him prompts Quentin to reflect on the relationship between blacks and whites (86). Other passengers are "women with market baskets" and a man in "a stained hat with a pipe stuck in the band" (89).

These are the people passing along the streets in Cambridge outside Quentin's streetcar window - he sees "the crowns of people's heads passing beneath new straw hats not yet unbleached" (89).