id, while his eyes
still ran here and there:--

"Wonderful street, this Broadway!"

He straightened up to his fullest height and looked again, now down the
way, now up, his eye kindling with the electric contagion of the scene.
His senses were all awake. They took in, with a spirit of welcome, all
the vast movement: the uproar, the feeling of unbounded multitude, the
commercial splendor, the miles of towering buildings; the long,
writhing, grinding mass of coming and going vehicles, the rush of
innumerable feet, and the countless forms and faces hurrying, dancing,
gliding by, as though all the world's mankind, and womankind, and
childhood must pass that way before night.

"How many people, do you suppose, go by this corner in a single hour?"
asked the man with the retreating chin. But again he got no answer. He
might as well not have yielded the topic of conversation as he had done;
so he resumed it. "No, I didn't believe it," he said. "Why, look at the
Southern vote of last November--look at New Orleans. The way it went
there, I shouldn't have supposed twenty-five per cent. of the people
would be in favor of secession. Would you?"

But his companion, instead of looking at New Orleans, took note of two
women who had come to a halt within a yard of them and seemed to be
waiting, as he and his companion were, for an opportunity to cross the
street. The two new-comers were very different in appearance, the one
from the other. The older and larger was much beyond middle life, red,
fat, and dressed in black stuff, good as to fabric, but uncommonly bad
as to fit. The other was young and pretty, refined, tastefully dressed,
and only the more interesting for the look of permanent anxiety that
asserted itself with distinctness about the corners of her eyes and
mouth. She held by the hand a rosy, chubby little child, that seemed
about three years old, and might be a girl or might be a boy, so far as
could be discerned by masculine eyes. The man did not see this fifth
member of their group until the elder woman caught it under the arms in
her large hands, and, lifting it above her shoulder, said, looking far
up the street:--

"O paypy, paypy, choost look de fla-ags! One, two, dtree,--a tuzzent, a
hundut, a dtowsant fla-ags!"

Evidently the child did not know her well. The little face remained
without a smile, the lips sealed, the shoulders drawn up, and the legs
pointing straight to the spot whence they had been lifted. She