our
cities and towns.

These were not confined to public buildings, and to the houses and
warehouses of the rich, but the poorest families displayed their bit of
crape. Outside of a miserable shanty in Brooklyn was displayed a cheap
print of the President, framed in black, with these words written below,
"We mourn our loss." Even as I write, the insignia of grief are still to
be seen in the tenement-house districts on the East Side of New York,
and there seems a reluctance to remove them.

But not alone to our own country were confined the exhibitions of
sympathy, and the anxious alternations of hope and fear. There was
scarcely a portion of the globe in which the hearts of the people were
not deeply stirred by the daily bulletins that came from the sick couch
of the patient sufferer. Of the profound impression made in England I
shall give a description, contributed to the New York _Tribune_ by its
London correspondent, Mr. G.W. Smalley, only premising that the sympathy
and grief were universal: from the Queen, whose messages of tender,
womanly sympathy will not soon be forgotten, to the humblest
day-laborers in the country districts. Never in England has such grief
been exhibited at the sickness and death of a foreign ruler, and the
remembrance of it will draw yet closer together, for all time to come,
the two great sections of the English-speaking tongue. Were it not a
subject of such general interest, I should apologize for the space I
propose to give to England's mourning:

"It happened that some of the humbler classes were among the most eager
to signify their feelings. The omnibus-drivers had each a knot of crape
on his whip. Many of the cabmen had the same thing, and so had the
draymen. In the city, properly so called, and along the water-side, it
was the poorer shops and the smaller craft that most frequently
exhibited tokens of public grief. Of the people one met in mourning the
same thing was true. Between mourning put on for the day and that which
was worn for private affliction it was not possible to distinguish. But
in many cases it was plain enough that the black coat on the
workingman's shoulders, or the bonnet or bit of crape which a shop-girl
wore, was no part of their daily attire. They had done as much as they
could to mark themselves as mourners for the President. It was not much,
but it was enough. It had cost them some thought, a little pains,
sometimes a little money, and they were people whos