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 of philosophical observer. In this
character he remained in the car and let it carry him by the corner
where he ought to have got out