ld frowned
on the lines of men and women pressed back against the curbstones. The
thought that they were waiting the coming of the body of that boy who
had died in Mexico added to his annoyance the realization that he would
have to fight his way through another crowd at the station if he wished
to reach the train-shed where Peter's train would come. The struggle was
spared him, however, by the recognition of a newspaper reporter who took
it for granted that the ambassador to Forsland had come to meet the
funeral cortege of the marine and who led him through a labyrinthine
passage that brought him past the gates and under the glass dome of the
train-shed.

Left alone, Thorold paced the platform a little apart from the group
of men who had evidently been delegated to represent the city. Some
of them he knew. Others of them, men of Isador Framberg's people and
of the ten tribes of Israel, he did not care to know. He turned away
from them to watch the people beyond the gates. Thousands of faces,
typical of every nation of Europe and some of the lands of Asia, fair
Norsemen and Teutons, olive-skinned Italians and men and women of the
swarthier peoples of Palestine, Poles, Finns, Lithuanians, Russians,
Bulgars, Bohemians, units of that mass which had welded in the city
of the Great Lakes of America, looked out from behind the iron fence.
The tensity written on their faces, eager yet awed, brought back to
James Thorold another time when men and women had stood within a
Chicago railway terminal waiting for a funeral cortege, the time when
Illinois waited in sorrow to take Abraham Lincoln, dead, to her heart.
The memory of that other day of dirges linked itself suddenly in the
mind of James Thorold with the picture of the lilacs blooming in the
yard of the Adams homestead on the parkway, that old house where Abraham
Lincoln had been wont to come; and the fusing recollections spun the
ambassador to Forsland upon his heel and sent him far down the platform,
where he stood, gloomily apart, until the limited, rolling in from the
end of the yards, brought him hastening to its side.

Peter Thorold was the first to alight.

A boy of sixteen, fair-haired, blue-eyed, ruddy-cheeked, springing
from the platform of the Pullman into his father's arms, he brought
with him the atmosphere of high adventure. In height, in poise of
shoulders, in bearing, in a certain trick of lifting his chin, he
was a replica of the dignified man who welcomed