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I sauntered round to bank, paid a note that had fallen due, got a check cashed, and, having counted the money and secured it in my pocket-book, I walked out and stood upon the bank-steps, talking with a business-friend, who inquired after John Meavy. 'T was a pleasant theme to converse about, this, for me! "A news-boy came running down Wall Street, with papers under his arm.
Balfour atoned for his previous indifference to the wares of the news-boy by sending him next morning to the station for all the local papers. In each, as he expected, there was a paragraph headed Mysterious Disappearance, and as lengthened an account as professional ingenuity could devise of the unaccountable departure of Mr. Solomon Coe from his house at Gethin.
Thereupon the latter took a card from his pocket, and handed it across the table to his new friend. The old man read the card, with his sharp gray eyes, which glowed up funnily at Bert, seeming to say, "Isn't this rather aristocratic for a twelve-year-old news-boy?" Bert blushed and explained: "Got up for me by a printer's boy I know. I had done some favors for him, and so he made me a few cards.
Who'd believe this was a news-boy?" and various other exclamations escaped from them. "Charley has done well this time." Yes, Charley did well, and he will not soon forget the lesson he learned that month. He knows more of the true use of money than ever before. The first of December the boys voted to keep the bank closed till the third of January.
As he grumbled over his mishaps, in his peculiar vernacular, laughter commenced with the men, and ended in a roar at the song of the news-boy. A crowd gathers food for mirth from the most trivial matters. Incidents that would not provoke a smile individually, convulse them collectively. Men under restraint in ranks are particularly infectious from the influence of the passions.
The mute news-boy on the corner said never a word as he handed to the speechless buyers the damp sheets from the press; only he brushed, with unwashed hand, the tears from his dirty cheeks.
It was a matter which appealed to the commonest news-boy on the street, and its meaning once made plain, the principle which gave vitality to the meaning was ready for enunciation and was assured of intelligent acceptance.
You should have seen us, with pale faces and hurried steps, making our way amid the jeers and gibes of our tormentors some of the little ones blubbering, one or two of the bigger ones looking hardly comfortable, and a few of the biggest inwardly ruminating when and how it would best be possible to kill that Runnit the news-boy, or Hodge the cow-boy!
Not the cold, wet, chilly night, that is settling down on the forlorn-looking city outside; not the cheerless night, that makes the news-boy gather his rags more closely about him, and stand under the projecting doorway of some dilapidated, tenantless building, as he cries "Free Press, only two cents:" not the awful night on which the gaunt haggard children, who thrive on starvation, crouch shiveringly around the last hissing fagot on the fire-place, with big, hungry eyes wandering over the low ceiling and the mouldy walls, or resting perchance on the wet, dirty panes, with their stuffings of tattered clothing, or gazing in a wilder longing still, on the bare shelves and the empty bread-box: Oh no!
"Oh! why did you go for a soldier?" sang our little news-boy, tauntingly, as he capered behind a big burly Dutchman in the rear rank, who had encountered all manner of misfortune that morning, missing his coffee and what is a man worth on a day's march without coffee because it was too hot to drink, when the bugle sounded the call to fall in, his meat raw, not even the smell of fire about it, and his crackers half roasted; his clothes, too, half on, belts twisted, knapsack badly made up.
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