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Officer 4434 beat his freezing hands together as he stood with his back to the snow-laden north-easter, which rattled the creaking signboards of East Twelfth Street, and covered, with its merciful shroud of wet flakes, the ash-barrels, dingy stoops, gaudy saloon porticos and other architectural beauties of the Avenue corner. Officer 4434 was on "fixed post."
To these belonged the frowzy serving-women; to these the rows of ash-barrels, in which the decrepit children and mothers of the streets were clawing for bits of coal. By the time Basil and Isabel reached Broadway there were already some omnibuses beginning their long day's travel up and down the handsome, tiresome length of that avenue; but for the most part it was empty.
Once she found herself in the afternoon torrent of Broadway, swept past tawdry shops and flaming theatrical posters, with a succession of meaningless faces gliding by in the opposite direction... A feeling of faintness reminded her that she had not eaten since morning. She turned into a side street of shabby houses, with rows of ash-barrels behind bent area railings.
Sometimes a weak cock-a-doodle-doo from a travelling chicken-coop announced the whereabouts of a helpless though still irrepressible rooster. Back yards had been visited, and oyster-cans, ash-barrels and unsightly kitchen debris brought to light. It was a mighty revolution where the dregs of society were no longer suppressed, but sailed in state on the top wave.
There was the usual number of cats, gaunt and voracious, which foraged in its ash-barrels; but beyond the family of three-legged cats, that presented its own problem of heredity, the kittens took it from the mother, who had lost one leg under the wheels of a dray, there was nothing specially remarkable about them.
To the Deputy Mayor and the Council, the Chief Constable, on the advice of Gabriel Druse, had said that it was far better to have the meeting in front of the Town Hall where he could, on the instant, summon special constables from within if necessary, while the influence of a well-built platform and the orderly arrangement of a regular meeting were better than a mob oration from the tops of ash-barrels.
When he had found his way, among the ash-barrels and the groups of decently dressed church-goers, to the docks, he experienced a sufficient excitement in the recent arrival of a French steamer, whose sheds were thronged with hacks and express-wagons, and in a tacit inquiry into the emotions of the passengers, fresh from the cleanliness of Paris, and now driving up through the filth of those streets.
Rose had been in Boston now for some weeks, and she was sitting in the Joy Street boarding-house, Joy Street, forsooth! It was nearly bedtime, and she was looking out upon a huddle of roofs and back yards, upon a landscape filled with clothes-lines, ash-barrels, and ill-fed cats.
He would paste these pictures into a scrap-book and sell it to a mother as a picture-book for her children. Edward saw that the Italian's idea smacked of originality and he asked the man where he got his pictures. "From the cans I find on lots and in ash-barrels," was the reply.
The indicator had leaped up fifty kilometres an hour above safety speed, and I realized that I must be traveling earthward at a terrific pace. The manner of the descent became clear at the same moment. I expected to see dogs and dishpans, baby carriages and ash-barrels roll out of every house in France, and go clattering off into space.
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