cold dish-water a cloak of swift snow fell
upon the city, muffling its voice like a hand held against its mouth.
Children who had never before beheld a white Christmas leaped with the
joy of it. A sudden army of men with blue faces and no overcoats sprang
full-grown and armed with shovels, from out the storm. City parks lay
etched in sudden finery. Men coming up out of the canon of Wall Street
remembered that it was Christmas and felt for bauble money.

At early dusk and through the white dance of the white storm the city
slid its four million packs off its four million backs and turned
homeward. Pedestrians with the shopper's light in their eyes bent into
the flurry and darted for surface cars and subways. Commuters, laden
with bundles and with tickets between their teeth, rushed for early
trains.

Women with bearing-down bundles and babies wedged through the
crowd, fighting for trains and place. Boys in cadet uniforms and
boarding-school girls, homeward bound, thrust forward their shining
faces as if into the to-morrow. A tight tangle of business men passed
single file through a trellised gateway and on down to a lower level. A
messenger with a tipsy spray of holly stuck upright in his cap whacked
with a folded newspaper at a fellow-messenger's swift legs and darted in
and around the knees of the crowd. A prodigal hesitated, then bought a
second-class ticket for home. Two nuns hurried softly on missions of
Christmas.

The low thunder of a thousand feet: tired feet, eager feet; flat feet;
shabby feet; young feet; callous feet; arched and archless feet.
Voices that rose like wind to a gale. A child dragged by the arm and
whimpering. A group of shawled strangers interchanging sharp jargon.

Within the marble mausoleum of a waiting-room, its benches lined with
the kaleidoscopic faces of the traveling public, a train-announcer
bellowed a paean of tracks and stations.

At the onyx-and-nickel-plated periodical stand men in passing snatched
their evening paper from off the stack of the counter, flopping down
their pennies as they ran. In the glow of a spray of red and white
electric bulbs, in a bower of the instant's pretty-girl periodical
covers, and herself the most vivid of them all, Miss Marjorie Clark
caught a hastily flung copper coin on the fly, her laughter mounting
with it.

"Whoops, la-la!"

"Good catch, kiddo."

"Oh, you Charley-boy, who was you pitching for last season?"

"The Reds, because that's your