e mighty city, which kept on about its business as tranquilly as if
the private war being fought out in its midst were a vague rumor of
Indian troubles on the frontier; and he realized how there might once
have been a street feud of forty years in Florence without interfering
materially with the industry and prosperity of the city. On Broadway
there was a silence where a jangle and clatter of horse-car bells and
hoofs had been, but it was not very noticeable; and on the avenues,
roofed by the elevated roads, this silence of the surface tracks was not
noticeable at all in the roar of the trains overhead. Some of the
cross-town cars were beginning to run again, with a policeman on the rear
of each; on the Third Avenge line, operated by non-union men, who had not
struck, there were two policemen beside the driver of every car, and two
beside the conductor, to protect them from the strikers. But there were
no strikers in sight, and on Second Avenue they stood quietly about in
groups on the corners. While March watched them at a safe distance, a car
laden with policemen came down the track, but none of the strikers
offered to molest it. In their simple Sunday best, March thought them
very quiet, decent-looking people, and he could well believe that they
had nothing to do with the riotous outbreaks in other parts of the city.
He could hardly believe that there were any such outbreaks; he began more
and more to think them mere newspaper exaggerations in the absence of any
disturbance, or the disposition to it, that he could see. He walked on to
the East River.

Avenues A, B, and C presented the same quiet aspect as Second Avenue;
groups of men stood on the corners, and now and then a police-laden car
was brought unmolested down the tracks before them; they looked at it and
talked together, and some laughed, but there was no trouble.

March got a cross-town car, and came back to the West Side. A policeman,
looking very sleepy and tired, lounged on the platform.

"I suppose you'll be glad when this cruel war is over," March suggested,
as he got in.

The officer gave him a surly glance and made him no answer.

His behavior, from a man born to the joking give and take of our life,
impressed March. It gave him a fine sense of the ferocity which he had
read of the French troops putting on toward the populace just before the
coup d'etat; he began to feel like the populace; but he struggled with
himself and regained his character