Project Gutenberg's Harper's Round Table, July 23, 1895, by Various

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Title: Harper's Round Table, July 23, 1895

Author: Various

Release Date: July 4, 2010 [EBook #33071]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HARPER'S ROUND TABLE, JULY 23, 1895 ***

Produced by Annie McGuire

[Illustration: HARPER'S ROUND TABLE]

Copyright, 1895, by HARPER & BROTHERS. All Rights Reserved.

* * * * *

PUBLISHED WEEKLY. NEW YORK, TUESDAY, JULY 23, 1895. FIVE CENTS A COPY.

VOL. XVI.--NO. 821. TWO DOLLARS A YEAR.

* * * * *

[Illustration]

CORPORAL FRED.

A Story of the Riots.

BY CAPTAIN CHARLES KING, U.S.A.

CHAPTER I.

It was a warm June evening, and the family was taking the air on the
back porch--father and mother, two stalwart young men, the elder sons,
two slender girls, and a romping boy of nine--the little Benjamin of the
tribe. It was a placid homelike group; father deep in the daily paper
and his easy-chair, mother absorbed in chat with the girls even while
keeping watchful eye on "the baby," the family's pet, pride, and torment
by turns, and the two elder sons sitting on the edge of the porch,
talking in low tone of an event that had called for no little discussion
all over the neighborhood--the strike of the switchmen in the great
freight yards only a block away. Five railway companies rolled their
trains in and out of the thronging, far-spreading metropolis to the
eastward--the great city whose hum and murmur were borne to them on the
soft breeze sweeping inland from the cool blue bosom of the lake. For
two miles along a number of parallel tracks were idly resting now by
hundreds the grimy freight cars of a dozen lines, while the gleaming
steel rails on the "through" tracks, kept cleared from end to end, were
as silent, as deserted, as the long tangents over the boundless prairies
miles to west and south, for, except on the mail trains, over the whole
system since the stroke of five that afternoon not a wheel was turning.
Never before in all their seven years of residence in this homelike
little frame cottage