unloading shiny cargoes of anthracite coal at city docks. But
now at last, as they took seats opposite one another in the crowded car,
they seemed to have drifted infinite distances and long epochs
asunder. They looked hopelessly across the intervening gulf, and mutely
questioned when it was and from what far city they or some remote
ancestors of theirs had set forth upon a wedding journey. They bade each
other a tacit farewell, and with patient, pathetic faces awaited the end
of the world.

When they alighted, they took their way up through one of the streets of
the great wholesale businesses, to Broadway. On this street was a throng
of trucks and wagons lading and unlading; bales and boxes rose and sank
by pulleys overhead; the footway was a labyrinth of packages of every
shape and size: there was no flagging of the pitiless energy that
moved all forward, no sign of how heavy a weight lay on it, save in
the reeking faces of its helpless instruments. But when the
wedding-journeyers emerged upon Broadway, the other passages and
incidents of their dream faded before the superior fantasticality of the
spectacle. It was four o'clock, the deadliest hour of the deadly summer
day. The spiritless air seemed to have a quality of blackness in it, as
if filled with the gloom of low-hovering wings. One half the street lay
in shadow, and one half in sun; but the sunshine itself was dim, as if
a heat greater than its own had smitten it with languor. Little gusts
of sick, warm wind blew across the great avenue at the corners of the
intersecting streets. In the upward distance, at which the journeyers
looked, the loftier roofs and steeples lifted themselves dim out of the
livid atmosphere, and far up and down the length of the street swept
a stream of tormented life. All sorts of wheeled things thronged it,
conspicuous among which rolled and jarred the gaudily painted Stages,
with quivering horses driven each by a man who sat in the shade of
a branching white umbrella, and suffered with a moody truculence of
aspect, and as if he harbored the bitterness of death in his heart for
the crowding passengers within, when one of them pulled the strap about
his legs, and summoned him to halt. Most of the foot-passengers kept to
the shady side, and to the unaccustomed eyes of the strangers they were
not less in number than at any other time, though there were fewer women
among them. Indomitably resolute of soul, they held their course with
the