of their day's pleasure. Not that it was really the end, for there was
the airy swoop homeward in the Elevated train, through all that ugly
picturesqueness of bridges and boats and blocks of buildings, with the
added interest of seeing the back-flying streets below now full of
children let loose from school for the afternoon, and possessing the
roadways and sidewalks as if these, too, were common property like the
park. It seemed to the companions that the children increased toward the
shabbier waterside, and decreased wherever the houses looked better,
through that mystical law of population by which poverty is richer than
prosperity is in children. They could see them yelling and screaming at
their games, though they could not hear them, and they yelled and
screamed the louder to the eye because they were visibly for the
greatest part boys. If they were the offspring of alien parents, they
might be a proof of American decay; but, on the other hand, the
preponderance of boys was in repair of that disproportion of the sexes
which in the east of these States is such a crying evil.
Perhaps it was the behavior of the child in the opposite seat which made
the companions think of girls as a crying evil; the mental operations
are so devious and capricious; but this child was really a girl. She was
a pretty child and prettily dressed, with a little face full of a
petulant and wilful charm, which might well have been too much for her
weak, meek young mother. She wanted to be leaning more than half out of
the window and looking both ways at once, and she fought away the feebly
restraining hands with sharp, bird-like shrieks, so that the companions
expected every moment to see her succeed in dashing herself to death,
and suffered many things from their fear. When it seemed as if nothing
could save them, the guard came in and told the weak, meek mother that
the child must not lean out of the window. Instantly, such is the force
of all constituted authority among us, the child sat down quietly in her
mother's lap, and for the rest of the journey remained an example to
angels, so that the companions could rejoice as much in her goodness as
in her loveliness. She became, indeed, the crown of their happy day, a
day so happy that now in the faint air of August it is hard to believe
it even of May.
THE END