ot know her was
comforting. She wished she could find out who some of them
were.--There was a tall man with a sweeping brown beard, whose heavy
overcoat looked as though it had been put on with a shovel; he wore
spectacles, and his eyes were blue, and always seemed as if they were
going to laugh; he, also, looked into the shops as he went along, and
he seemed to know everybody. Every few paces people would halt and
shake his hand, but these people never spoke because the big man with
the brown beard would instantly burst into a fury of speech which had
no intervals, and when there was no one with him at all he would talk
to himself. On these occasions he did not see any one, and people had
to jump out of his way while he strode onwards swinging his big head
from one side to the other, and with his eyes fixed on some place a
great distance away. Once or twice, in passing, she heard him singing
to himself the most lugubrious song in the world. There was another--a
long, thin, black man--who looked young and was always smiling secretly
to himself; his lips were never still for a moment, and, passing Mary
Makebelieve a few times, she heard him buzzing like a great bee. He did
not stop to shake hands with any one, and although many people saluted
him he took no heed, but strode on smiling his secret smile and buzzing
serenely. There was a third man whom she often noticed: his clothing
seemed as if it had been put on him a long time ago and had never been
taken off again. He had a long, pale face, with a dark moustache
drooping over a most beautiful mouth. His eyes were very big and lazy,
and did not look quite human; they had a trick of looking sidewards--a
most intimate, personal look. Sometimes he saw nothing in the world but
the pavement, and at other times he saw everything. He looked at Mary
Makebelieve once and she got a fright; she had a queer idea that she had
known him well hundreds of years before and that he remembered her also.
She was afraid of that man, but she liked him because he looked so
gentle and so--there was something else he looked which as yet she could
not put a name to, but which her ancestry remembered dimly. There was a
short, fair, pale-faced man, who looked like the tiredest man in the
world. He was often preoccupied, but not in the singular way the others
were. He seemed to be always chewing the cud of remembrance, and looked
at people as if they reminded him of other people who were dead a long