. Only persons of heavier ballast--such as have been fed on
sweets--plump pancake persons--can hold now an umbrella to the ground.
A long stowage of muffins and sugar is the only anchor.

At this moment beneath my window there is a dear little girl who
brings home a package from the grocer's. She is tugged and blown by
her umbrella, and at every puff of wind she goes up on tiptoe. If I
were writing a fairy tale I would make her the Princess of my plot,
and I would transport her underneath her umbrella in this whisking
wind to her far adventures, just as Davy sailed off to the land of
Goblins inside his grandfather's clock. She would be carried over
seas, until she could sniff the spice winds of the south. Then she
would be set down in the orchard of the Golden Prince, who presently
would spy her from his window--a mite of a pretty girl, all mussed and
blown about. And then I would spin out the tale to its true and happy
end, and they would live together ever after. How she labors at the
turn, hugging her paper bag and holding her flying skirts against her
knees! An umbrella, however, usually turns inside out before it gets
you off the pavement, and then it looks like a wrecked Zeppelin. You
put it in the first ash-can, and walk off in an attempt not to be
conspicuous.

Although the man who pursues his hat is, in some sort, conscious that
he plays a comic part, and although there is a pleasing relish on the
curb at his discomfort, yet it must not be assumed that all the humor
on the street rises from misadventure. Rather, it arises from a
general acceptance of the day and a feeling of common partnership in
the storm. The policeman in his rubber coat exchanges banter with a
cab-driver. If there is a tangle in the traffic, it comes nearer to a
jest than on a fairer day. A teamster sitting dry inside his hood,
whistles so cheerily that he can be heard at the farther sidewalk.
Good-naturedly he sets his tune as a rival to the wind.

It must be that only good-tempered persons are abroad--those whose
humor endures and likes the storm--and that when the swift dark clouds
drove across the world, all sullen folk scurried for a roof. And is it
not wise, now and then, that folk be thus parceled with their kind?
Must we wait for Gabriel's Trump for our division? I have been
told--but the story seems incredible--that that seemingly cursed
thing, the Customs' Wharf, was established not so much for our
nation's profit as in acceptan