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The good 'traeger' who took possession of them and their hand-bags, put their boxes on a baggage-bearing drosky, and then got them another drosky for their personal transportation. This was a drosky of the first-class, but they would not have thought it so, either from the vehicle itself, or from the appearance of the driver and his horses.
The big trunk was packed and locked and placed in the lower hall, ready to go. Now there were only the hand-bags and satchels to be filled with the last needful articles. This task was not so easy as one might expect, however. On the contrary, mother and aunty found it the most difficult part of the whole.
"How young I am, and how young the world is!" She let her eyes fall from the sky and plunge into the turmoil of the station, turmoil of people getting in and out of trains, of porters running with luggage, of restaurant employés wheeling stands of food through the crowd, piled oranges and mandarines, and white grapes, decorated with leaves and a few flowers; soldiers arriving or saying goodbye, jolly dark youths in red and blue; an Arab trying to sell scarfs from Algiers; a Turkish family travelling; English men and women newly landed, with P. & O. labels large on their hand-bags; French bonnes wearing quaint stiff caps and large floating ribbons; Indian ayahs wrapped in shawls.
I only know that very late that night, as late as eleven o'clock, I was turning out of Park Lane into Piccadilly, where the poor "public women" with their painted faces, dangling their little hand-bags from their wrists, were promenading in front of the gentlemen's clubs and smiling up at the windows.
At the best, the portables of such a party are apt to be grievous embarrassments: a package of shawls and parasols and umbrellas and India- rubbers, however neatly made up at first, quickly degenerates into a shapeless mass, which has finally to be carried with as great tenderness as an ailing child; and the lunch is pretty sure to overflow the hand-bags and to eddy about you in paper parcels; while the bottle of claret, that bulges the side of one of the bags, and
Their boxes had been dispatched the previous day, their hand-bags had gone on by cart before breakfast and would be waiting for them at the station, where Jones, that most useful factotum, would, by special arrangement with the station-master, be taking their tickets before the ordinary opening of the booking-office.
Some of the sections in the middle of the car were made down for the night, and while he was stumbling in the wake of the porter over the shoes and the hand-bags left in the aisle, the train started. "Lower ten, sah," said the black boy, and went about his business in the linen locker.
Hours, even days, passed by, and the passengers on the ocean steamers were sometimes kept waiting the arrival of the river boats that were aground or had been belated up the stream. About two hundred of us boarded the first boat. Our luggage of the larger sort was stowed away in barges and towed after us. The decks were strewn with hand-bags, camp-stools, bundles, and rolls of rugs.
Presently they were told to leave the car one by one, but to take nothing with them. All their hand-bags, rugs, and belongings were to remain in the berths, just as they lay. One by one they were marched under escort to a large and bare waiting-room, which had, no doubt, been prepared for their reception.
And each, with half a million dollars in his hand, hurried to the ferry, assailed by porters, news-boys, hackmen. To them we were a couple of commuters saving a dime by carrying our own hand-bags. It was now six o'clock, and I pointed out to Edgar that at that hour the only vaults open were those of the Night and Day Bank. And to that institution in a taxicab we at once made our way.
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