her side of the
way. They had a crude taste in architecture, and they admired the
worst. There were women's faces at many of the handsome windows, and
once in a while a young man on the pavement caught his hat suddenly
from his head, and bowed in response to some salutation from within.

"I don't think our girls would look very bad behind one of those big
panes," said the Colonel.

"No," said his wife dreamily.

"Where's the YOUNG man? Did he come with them?"

"No; he was to spend the winter with a friend of his that has a ranch
in Texas. I guess he's got to do something."

"Yes; gentlemaning as a profession has got to play out in a generation
or two."

Neither of them spoke of the lot, though Lapham knew perfectly well
what his wife had come with him for, and she was aware that he knew it.
The time came when he brought the mare down to a walk, and then slowed
up almost to a stop, while they both turned their heads to the right
and looked at the vacant lot, through which showed the frozen stretch
of the Back Bay, a section of the Long Bridge, and the roofs and
smoke-stacks of Charlestown.

"Yes, it's sightly," said Mrs. Lapham, lifting her hand from the reins,
on which she had unconsciously laid it.

Lapham said nothing, but he let the mare out a little.

The sleighs and cutters were thickening round them. On the Milldam it
became difficult to restrict the mare to the long, slow trot into which
he let her break. The beautiful landscape widened to right and left of
them, with the sunset redder and redder, over the low, irregular hills
before them. They crossed the Milldam into Longwood; and here, from
the crest of the first upland, stretched two endless lines, in which
thousands of cutters went and came. Some of the drivers were already
speeding their horses, and these shot to and fro on inner lines,
between the slowly moving vehicles on either side of the road. Here
and there a burly mounted policeman, bulging over the pommel of his
M'Clellan saddle, jolted by, silently gesturing and directing the
course, and keeping it all under the eye of the law. It was what
Bartley Hubbard called "a carnival of fashion and gaiety on the
Brighton road," in his account of it. But most of the people in those
elegant sleighs and cutters had so little the air of the great world
that one knowing it at all must have wondered where they and their
money came from; and the gaiety of the men, at least, was expressed,
like