ings of bells set
up a familiar jingle. "Easy as a baby carriage!" And Great Taylor
laughed. The cart reached the sidewalk, bumped down over the curb and
pulling Great Taylor with it went beyond the centre of the street. She
tried to turn back but a clanging trolley car cut in between her and
the curb, a wheel of the junk-cart caught in the smooth steel track
and skidded as if it were alive with a stupid will of its own. "It
ain't so easy," she admitted. With a wrench she extracted the wheel,
narrowly avoided an elevated post and crashed head on into a
push-cart, laden with green bananas resting on straw. An Italian swore
in two languages and separated the locked wheels.

Hurriedly Great Taylor shoved away from the fruit man and became
pocketed in the traffic. Two heavy-hoofed horses straining against wet
leather collars crowded her toward the curb and shortly the traffic
became blocked. She looked for a means of escape and had succeeded in
getting one wheel over the curb when a man touched her on the arm.
"Someone is calling from the window up there," he said in a low weary
voice like Grit's. Nell swung around, gasping, but the man had moved
away down the sidewalk and a woman was calling to her from a
second-story window.

"How much?" called the woman, waving a tin object that glinted in the
sunlight. Great Taylor stared stupidly. "Clothes boiler," yelled the
woman. "Fifty cents.... Just needs soldering." "What?" stammered Nell.
"Fifty cents," shouted the woman in the window. And something prompted
Great Taylor to reply, "Give you a dime."

"Quarter," insisted the woman. "Dime ... Ten cents," repeated Great
Taylor, somewhat red in the face. "Once I set a price I'm a ..." But
the woman's head had disappeared and her whole angular person soon
slid out through the doorway. Entirely befogged, Great Taylor fumbled
in her patent-leather bag with its worsted fruit, discovered two
nickels, and placed the leaky boiler beside the rusty scales on the
junk-cart.

"Ain't I got enough junk without that?" she grumbled. But the traffic
of the Devil's Own city was moving again and Great Taylor was moving
with it. She passed a corner where a clock in a drug store told her
the time--ten minutes of the hour. "I got to get back," she told
herself, and heading her cart determinedly for an opening succeeded in
crossing to the opposite side of the congested avenue. There, a child,
attracted by the jingling of the bells, ran out of a hous