, and the succession of explosions sometimes wakens one
before dawn or after midnight with the frightened conviction that a
foreign fleet is upon us to force us to reduce the tariff. The
blasting occasionally goes a little too far, and breaks windows or
brings down pieces of the ceiling. Last week it caved in a house and
broke some arms and legs of the occupants. One woman went into
convulsions, and was rigid for hours from the shock, but as nobody was
killed no action was taken.

Old clothes men are permitted a string of bells on their carts, which
all jangle out of tune and at once, while street-cries of all
descriptions abound in such numbers and of such a quality that I often
wonder that the very babies trundled by in their perambulators do not
go into spasms with the confusion of it.

Considine and I stated all this with some excusable heat while the
Angel was serving our guests with what their different tastes demanded.
It always gives me a feeling of unholy joy seeing Mrs. Jimmie trying to
join her husband in his low pleasures. She regarded it as a religious
duty to take beer when he did while we were abroad, but in England and
here he takes whiskey and soda, so as champagne is not always on tap in
people's houses, sometimes she tries to emulate his example.

Have you ever seen anybody take cod-liver oil? Well, that is the look
which comes over Mrs. Jimmie's face when the odour of whiskey assails
her aristocratic nostrils. Nevertheless she valiantly sits the whole
evening through with her long glass in her hand. The ice melts and the
whole mess grows warm and nauseous, but she hangs on, sipping at it
with an air of determined enjoyment painful to see. If she did as she
would like, she would either hold her nose and gulp it all down at once
or else she would fling glass and all out of the window.

In vain we all try to make it easy for her to refuse. If we don't
offer it she looks hurt, so the kindest thing we can do is to pretend
we notice nothing, and to let her believe that she is her husband's
boon companion, since that is her futile ambition.

Jimmie crossed his feet, blew a cloud of smoke into the air, and
carried on the attack by saying:

"London, Paris, and Berlin all put together cannot furnish the noise of
New York, while the roar of Chicago is the stillness of a cathedral
compared to it. And most of it, I may be allowed to state, is entirely
unnecessary. The papers are full of accounts