what they most wanted and they went down to get wraps from the check room.
They left the umbrellas till later, put on their wraps and left the
store.

"Now then," said Mr. Merrill, "see that big bus down there--we're going
for a ride on the top."

"What's a bus?" asked Mary Jane, who had never heard the word before. But
before her father could answer they were pushed into the crowd at the
crossing, hurried across and the next second Mr. Merrill had hailed a
great, lumbering, top-heavy automobile and was helping the girls to step
aboard.

The "bus" proved to be a large-sized passenger automobile, with a deck on
top for passengers who wished to ride in the open air. Mary Jane and Alice
were thrilled with the fun of getting on it. It seemed exactly like going
aboard a house-boat on wheels. They stepped into a little hallway and
then--and this wasn't so easy because the bus immediately began to
move--they climbed up a curving flight of stairs and walked down an
aisle--an awfully wiggly aisle it was too!--to seats on the very front
row.

Then, before they had had a chance to look around or feel at home, the
conductor, who stood at the back, shouted, "Low bridge!" and everybody
ducked their heads while the great bus went under the elevated railroad.
Mary Jane felt, truly, as though she must be a person in a story
book--Arabian Nights or something marvelous--because surely the things
that were happening to her weren't _really_ happening.

But after the elevated was passed, the bus rolled out onto Michigan
Boulevard and Mary Jane settled herself comfortably in her front seat with
her mother, smiled across the aisle to Alice and her father and began to
feel really at home in her high perch. By the time the bus had turned
northward and crossed the river, she began to feel that riding on the top
of a bus was the thing she'd been wanting to do all her life. It was such
fun to sit up high and watch the lake, so blue and beautiful in the
sunshine, the trees just getting a tinge of green at the tips, the pretty
houses that lined the parkway, the people--it seemed as everybody in
Chicago must be out in their 'tother best clothes--and most of all, it was
fun to watch the automobiles dart in and out of the crowd, around the bus
and beside it, till Mary Jane was sure their driver must be some wonderful
being to be able to manage so that everybody stayed alive!

"Here, Mary Jane," said Mr. Merrill, interrupting Mary Jane's
sight-see