ng, half corrective. An attentive observer might have fancied
that during these periods of desultory self-inspection her face forgot
its melancholy; but as soon as she neared the window again it began to
proclaim that she was a very ill-pleased woman. And indeed, in what
met her eyes there was little to be pleased with. The window-panes were
battered by the sleet; the head-stones in the grave-yard beneath seemed
to be holding themselves askance to keep it out of their faces. A tall
iron railing protected them from the street, and on the other side of
the railing an assemblage of Bostonians were trampling about in the
liquid snow. Many of them were looking up and down; they appeared to be
waiting for something. From time to time a strange vehicle drew near to
the place where they stood,--such a vehicle as the lady at the window,
in spite of a considerable acquaintance with human inventions, had
never seen before: a huge, low omnibus, painted in brilliant colors,
and decorated apparently with jangling bells, attached to a species of
groove in the pavement, through which it was dragged, with a great deal
of rumbling, bouncing and scratching, by a couple of remarkably small
horses. When it reached a certain point the people in front of the
grave-yard, of whom much the greater number were women, carrying
satchels and parcels, projected themselves upon it in a compact body--a
movement suggesting the scramble for places in a life-boat at sea--and
were engulfed in its large interior. Then the life-boat--or the
life-car, as the lady at the window of the hotel vaguely designated
it--went bumping and jingling away upon its invisible wheels, with the
helmsman (the man at the wheel) guiding its course incongruously from
the prow. This phenomenon was repeated every three minutes, and the
supply of eagerly-moving women in cloaks, bearing reticules and bundles,
renewed itself in the most liberal manner. On the other side of the
grave-yard was a row of small red brick houses, showing a series of
homely, domestic-looking backs; at the end opposite the hotel a tall
wooden church-spire, painted white, rose high into the vagueness of
the snow-flakes. The lady at the window looked at it for some time; for
reasons of her own she thought it the ugliest thing she had ever seen.
She hated it, she despised it; it threw her into a state of irritation
that was quite out of proportion to any sensible motive. She had never
known herself to care so much