o much
fun for the younger lads. These latter were careering madly through
the crowd, precipitating minor accidents from time to time, but
usually fleeing like mist swept by the wind before retribution could
lay hands upon them.

The band played a waltz which involved a gift of prominence to the
bass horn, and one of the young men on the sidewalk said that the
music reminded him of the new engines on the hill pumping water into
the reservoir. A similarity of this kind was not inconceivable, but
the young man did not say it because he disliked the band's playing.
He said it because it was fashionable to say that manner of thing
concerning the band. However, over in the stand, Billie Harris, who
played the snare-drum, was always surrounded by a throng of boys, who
adored his every whack.

After the mails from New York and Rochester had been finally
distributed, the crowd from the post-office added to the mass already
in the park. The wind waved the leaves of the maples, and, high in the
air, the blue-burning globes of the arc lamps caused the wonderful
traceries of leaf shadows on the ground. When the light fell upon the
upturned face of a girl, it caused it to glow with a wonderful pallor.
A policeman came suddenly from the darkness and chased a gang of
obstreperous little boys. They hooted him from a distance. The leader
of the band had some of the mannerisms of the great musicians, and
during a period of silence the crowd smiled when they saw him raise
his hand to his brow, stroke it sentimentally, and glance upward with
a look of poetic anguish. In the shivering light, which gave to the
park an effect like a great vaulted hall, the throng swarmed, with a
gentle murmur of dresses switching the turf, and with a steady hum of
voices.

[Illustration: "The Band Played a Waltz"]

Suddenly, without preliminary bars, there arose from afar the great
hoarse roar of a factory whistle. It raised and swelled to a sinister
note, and then it sang on the night wind one long call that held the
crowd in the park immovable, speechless. The band-master had been
about to vehemently let fall his hand to start the band on a
thundering career through a popular march, but, smitten by this giant
voice from the night, his hand dropped slowly to his knee, and, his
mouth agape, he looked at his men in silence. The cry died away to a
wail and then to stillness. It released the muscles of the company of
young men on the sidewalk, who had been