Charles E. Burchfield, Journals December 29,1920

The sun is so low-down that Main Street at noon is like some valley or shallow canyon into which sunlight never looks, [except] three chinks in the walls, which are Penn, Lundy and Broadway street. Up these streets the sunlight pours joyously without hindrance, turning the icy pavements to blinding glares. But Main Street is in a gloomy shadow, cool dark and mysterious. The buildings on the south-side, have reflected in these windows a cold light from the North.

But Treat’s Drug-store Facing the South, chances to be placed opposite one of the chinks in the wall and is warmed by a flood of sunshine. Inside it is very still; the sunlight excessively frank, brings out its bare floor & streaked barren walls with startling clearness; which under a winter gloom, might attain a certain romance.

But in this harsh bitter sunlight there is no romance about the yellow-faced druggist or his obsequious apprentice always getting in the road when merely trying to be a “handy man about the place”. They do not know that beyond the white glare in the street outside, and beyond the hill, over which the street disappears, that this same sunlight floods some wild valley in which gleam speckled buttonwoods, and red willows along a frozen stream.

Charles E. Burchfield, Journals, December 29, 1920