a canopy of ribbons and flowers, a little stiffly,
perhaps, and self-consciously, but not more so than older queens and
kings on parade. A long line of boys and girls in many-coloured caps
moves between flying detachments of mothers carrying baskets. The
confectioner's wagon, laden with its precious commissariat of ice cream
and cake, moves leisurely behind; for the confectioner's horse this is
evidently a holiday. Is pathos conceivable in so delightful, so smiling,
an event? Alas, I have watched May parties go by, and the serious little
faces under the red and white caps have given me a heavier case of
_Weltschmerz_ than I have ever experienced at a performance of "Tristan
und Isolde." It was the fact of those little children advancing in
unison; that is the word. If they had trudged or scurried along,
pell-mell, I should not have minded. But May parties move forward in
procession, and the movement of a compact crowd is, to me, always heavy
with pathos.

But no crowd is like the afternoon crowd upon the wooden platform of the
"L" station at City Hall. I don't mean to be sentimental when I say that
the sound is to me like the march of human civilisation and human
history. Outwardly there is little to justify my grandiose comparison.
You see only a heaving mass of men and women who are not very well clad.
The men are unshaven, the women awry with a day's labour. They move on
with that beautiful optimism of an American crowd which has been trained
in the belief that there is always plenty of room ahead. There is very
little pushing. Occasionally a band of young boys hustle their way
through the crowd; but a New York crowd seems always to be mindful of
the days when we were all of us boys. It is a reading public. The men
carry newspapers whose flaring headlines of red and green give a touch
of almost Italian colour. The women carry cloth-bound novels in paper
wrappers. But it is not an assemblage of poets or scholars or thinkers,
or whatever class it is that is supposed to keep the world moving. It is
that most solemn of all things--a city crowd on its way home from the
day's work.

The footsteps keep up the tramp, tramp, on the board flooring, while
train after train pulls out jammed within and without. The influx from
the street allows no vacuum to be formed upon the platform. The patience
of the modern man shows wonderfully. The tired workers face the hour's
ride that lies between them and home with beautiful self-res