With the Procession | Page 4

and trebled--long rows of them appeared
overhead at incalculable altitudes. The gongs of the cable cars clanged
more and more imperiously as the crowds surged in great numbers
round grip and trailer. The night life of the town began to bestir itself,
and little Rosy, from her conspicuous place, beamed with a bright
intentness upon its motley spectacle, careless of where her smiles might
fall. For her the immodest theatrical poster drooped in the windows of
saloons, or caught a transient hold upon the hoardings of uncompleted
buildings; brazen blare and gaudy placards (disgusting rather than
indecent) invited the passer-by into cheap museums and music-halls;
all the unclassifiable riff-raff that is spawned by a great city leered from
corners, or slouched along the edge of the gutters, or stood in dark
doorways, or sold impossible rubbish in impossible dialects wherever
the public indulgence permitted a foothold.
To Rosy's mother all this involved no impropriety. Eliza Marshall's
Chicago was the Chicago of 1860, an Arcadia which, in some dim and
inexplicable way, had remained for her an Arcadia still--bigger, noisier,
richer, yet different only in degree, and not essentially in kind. She

herself had traversed these same streets in the days when they were the
streets of a mere town, Fane, accompanying her mother's courses as a
child, had seen the town develop into a city. And now Rosy followed in
her turn, though the urbs in horto of the earlier time existed only in the
memory of "old settlers" and in the device of the municipal seal, while
the great Black City stood out as a threatening and evil actuality. Mild
old Mabel had drawn them all in turn or together, and had
philosophized upon the facts as little as any of them; but Rosy's brother
(who had been about, and who knew more than he was ever likely to
tell) looked round at her now and then with a vague discomfort.
"There!" called their mother, suddenly; "did you see that?" A big
lumpish figure on the crossing had loomed up at the mare's head, a
rough hand had seized her bridle, and a raw voice with a rawer brogue
had vented a piece of impassioned profanity on both beast and driver.
"Well, I don't thank that policeman for hitting Mabel on the nose, I can
tell him. August, did you get his number?"
"No'm," answered the coachman. He turned round familiarly. "I got his
breath."
"I should think so," said Truesdale. "And such shoes as they have, and
such hands, and such linen! Didn't that fellow see what we were?
Couldn't he realize that we pay for the buttons on his coat? Mightn't he
have tried to apprehend that we were people of position here long
before he had scraped his wretched steerage-money together? And what
was it he had working in his cheek?"
"I think I know," responded August mumbling.
"Like enough," rejoined Truesdale, with his eye upon the coachman's
own jaw.
His mother's sputter of indignation died rapidly away. It was, indeed,
her notion that the guardians of the public peace should show some
degree of sobriety, respect, neatness, and self-control, as well as a
reasonable familiarity with the accents of the country; but her Arcadia
was full of painful discrepancies, and she did not add to her own pain

by too serious an attempt to reconcile them. Besides, what is a
policeman compared with a detective?
Mabel, released from the arm of the law, jarred over another line of car
tracks, whereon a long row of monsters glared at one another's slow
advances with a single great red eye, and then she struck a freer gait on
the succeeding stretch of Belgian blocks. Presently she passed a lofty
building which rose in colonnades one above another, but whose walls
were stained with smoke, whose windows were half full of shattered
panes, and whose fraudulent metallic cornice curled over limply and
jarred and jangled in the evening breeze--one more of the vicissitudes
of mercantile life.
"Well, I'm glad the fire-fiend hasn't got Marshall & Co. yet," said the
young man, restored to good-humor by the sight of another's
misfortune. He used unconsciously the old firm name.
"But he'd get us fast enough if the insurance was taken off," declared
Jane. "Do you know, Dicky," she went on, "how much that item costs
us a year? Or have you any idea how much it has amounted to in the
last twenty, without our ever getting one cent back? Well, there's ten
thousand in the Hartford and eight in the Monongahela and eleven in--"
"Dear me, Jane!" exclaimed her brother, in some surprise; "where do
you pick up all this?"
Rosy turned her head half round. "Mr. Brower tells her," she said, with
a disdainful brevity.
Her face was indistinct in