man,
elderly but agile, resting against the dash, by the side of the young
conductor, and evidently his intimate friend. The man wears a broad-brim
white hat. Among the jam inside, near the door, a young Englishwoman, of
the working class, with two children, has had trouble all the way with
the youngest, a strong, fat, fretful, bright babe of fourteen or fifteen
months, who bids fair to worry the mother completely out, besides
becoming a howling nuisance to everybody. As the car tugs around Capitol
Hill the young one is more demoniac than ever, and the flushed and
perspiring mother is just ready to burst into tears with weariness and
vexation. The car stops at the top of the hill to let off most of the
rear platform passengers, and the white-hatted man reaches inside, and,
gently but firmly disengaging the babe from its stifling place in the
mother's arms, takes it in his own, and out in the air. The astonished
and excited child, partly in fear, partly in satisfaction at the change,
stops its screaming, and, as the man adjusts it more securely to his
breast, plants its chubby hands against him, and, pushing off as far
as it can, gives a good long look squarely in his face,--then, as if
satisfied, snuggles down with its head on his neck, and in less than a
minute is sound and peacefully asleep without another whimper, utterly
fagged out. A square or so more and the conductor, who has had an
unusually hard and uninterrupted day's work, gets off for his first
meal and relief since morning. And now the white-hatted man, holding
the slumbering babe, also acts as conductor the rest of the distance,
keeping his eye on the passengers inside, who have by this time thinned
out greatly. He makes a very good conductor, too, pulling the bell to
stop or to go on as needed, and seems to enjoy the occupation. The babe
meanwhile rests its fat cheeks close on his neck and gray beard, one of
his arms vigilantly surrounding it, while the other signals, from time
to time, with the strap; and the flushed mother inside has a good half
hour to breathe, and to cool and recover herself.

II

No poem of our day dates and locates itself as absolutely as "Leaves of
Grass;" but suppose it had been written three or four centuries ago,
and had located itself in mediaeval Europe, and was now first brought
to light, together with a history of Walt Whitman's simple and
disinterested life, can there be any doubt about the cackling that would
at onc