ainst the sky, sent up wispy spirals of smoke. A
derrick in the jagged bowl of the quarry moved its giant arms slowly,
and a steam-whistle shrieked.

The New York accommodation hallooed to the trembling dawn and tore
through Slateville.

The sisters pressed their white faces close to the cold pane and watched
it rush into the sunrise. A cock crowed to the dawn, and, from afar,
another. A dirt-team rumbled up the road, and the steam-whistle from the
quarry blew a second reveille.

"You--you take the accommodation, darlin'. It's cheaper, and you'll be
feelin' scary about the flyer for a while. You can catch it down by
Terre Haute at five-thirty-one, Monday morning--eh, darlin'?"

"So--so soon, Cottie--only three days after, and him hardly cold."

"Don't let's drag it out, darlin'."

"Oh, Cottie, I'll be waitin' for you! There won't be a day that I won't
be waitin' for you. There's nothin' I love like you."

Their faces were close and wet with tears, and the first ray of sun
burnished their heads and whitened their white bosoms.

"Kiss me, Cottie."

"Della--Della!"

"My little sister!"

"You're goin', Della--try to think, darlin', what it means--you're
goin'."

"'Sh-h-h, dearie--'sh-h-h. Yes--I--I'm goin'."

And in the room adjoining John Blaney lay dead with a dent in his head.

* * * * *

The city has a thousand throats, its voice is like a storm running on
the wind, and like ship-high waves plunging on ship-high rocks, and like
unto the undertone of lost souls adrift in a sheol of fog and water.

The voice of the city knows none of the acoustic limitations of
architects and prima donnas. Its dome is as high as fifty-story
sky-scrapers, and its sounding-board the bases of a thousand thousand
tired brains.

It penetrates the Persian-velvet hangings of the most rococo palace
toward which the sight-seeing automobile points its megaphone, and beats
against brains neurotic with the problems of solid-gold-edged bonds and
solid-gold cotillion favors. It is the birth-song of the tenement child
and the swan-song of the weak. It travels out over fields of new-mown
hay and sings to the boy at the plow. It shouts to the victor and
whispers to the stranger.

Through the morning bedlam of alarm-clocks, slamming doors, the rattle
of ash-cans, and the internal disorders of a rooming-house, came the
voice a-whispering to Della.

Out from the mouths of babes and truck-drivers, out fr