re heavy trains crashed overhead and surface cars
clanged swiftly by. She would stand waiting on the sidewalk until a
friendly cart from a side street opened up a path of safety that brought
her a little breathless to the opposite walk.

Now she was almost home--the second door, three flights up, and then
restful quiet. Kathleen, her new friend, with whom she had come to live,
was away, and with windows closed she would sit in the front room, quite
by herself, her hands in her lap, enjoying the silence. Later, dinner
over, she would take up a novel, one of the books she had always wanted
to read, but could not afford to buy, that here in New York any one
might have at the library for the asking. Immersed in _Lorna Doone_, she
forgot the pounding machines and the clattering dishes and was very
happy; but when the book was put away and she lay down to sleep, through
the open window the world of tumult came back again.

"Why do men invent so many things that make a noise?" she would ask
herself. She had heard city people when they came to the Merryvales'
complain bitterly to her of being wakened in the morning by the cock's
crowing; but she had not made the cocks, and, moreover, they did not
crow all night. Here in her room, however, near the ugly boulevard of
the East Side, the man-made cocks never ceased to crow. The trolley cars
were the most aggressive; their wheels ground on their axles and jarred
upon the rails; they stopped with a loud jolt, and with another jar and
jolt were off again. They were always jerking, Hertha felt. Overhead the
elevated road vibrated to the heavy cars that moved over its rails day
and night. You heard the coming train a long way off. First, a gentle,
rumbling noise that you might imagine to be the sea; then a louder and
louder roar, and, finally, a crash as the long line of cars rushed past.
Sometimes she was sure they would sway too far and fall thundering into
the street. And hardly had their sound died away when a second rumbling
would be heard and another train come tearing after its fellow, or a
third dash by from the opposite side.

After a time the clamor ceased to be incessant. Trains followed at
longer intervals, and would-be street car passengers waited for some
minutes at the corner. But in these intervals there was always upon the
street the sound of footsteps. And long after midnight, if Hertha awoke
from her troubled sleep, she heard the tread of feet. Sometimes they
were s