n organ pulled up at the public-house which smiles goldenly upon
Mount Pleasant, and music broke upon us. Instantly, with the precision
of a harlequinade, a stream of giggling girls poured from Eyre Street
Hill and Back Hill. With the commencement of a rag-tag dance, the Point
was whipped to frivolous life. The loungers grunted, and moved up to
see. Clusters of children, little angels with dark eyes and language
sufficiently seasoned to melt a glacier, slipped up from nowhere, and,
one by one, the girls among them slid into the dance. One of them had a
beribboned tambourine. Two others wanted it, and would snatch it away.
Its owner said they were--something they could not possibly have been.

Stabs of light from the tenements pierced the dusk high and low. The
night shone with recent rain, and in a shifting haze of grey and rose
the dancers sank and glided, until the public-house lamp was turned on
and a cornet joined the organ. In the warm yellow light, the revels
broke bounds, and, to the hysterical appeal of "Hiawatha," the Point
became a Babel.... When most of the dancers had danced themselves to
exhaustion, two of the smaller maidens stood out and essayed a kind of
can-can.

The crowd swooped in. It crowded with appreciation as they introduced
all the piquant possibilities of the dance. It babbled its merriment at
seeing little faces, which should show only the revel of April, bearing
all the ravage of Autumn.

Comments and exhortations, spiced to taste, flew about the Point,
ricochetted, and returned in boomerang fashion to their authors, who
repolished them and shot them forth again. Heads bobbed back, forth, and
up in the effort to see. In a prestissimo fire of joy, the novel
exercise reached its finale, when ...

"Hi-hi! _He._ _Eeeee!_" As though by signal, the whole Point was
suddenly aspurt with spears of flame, leaping, meeting, and crossing. We
looked round. The dance stopped, the organ gurgled away to rubbish, the
crowd took open order, and stared at the narrow alley of Back Hill.
Blankets of smoke moved from its mouth, pushing their suffocating way up
the street. Twenty people hurt themselves in shrieking orders. Women
screamed and ran. From an open window a tongue of flame was thrust
derisively; it tickled a man's neck, and he swore. Then a lone woman had
the sense to scream something intelligible.

We all ran. English, Italian, and profane clashed together. Three small
boys strangled each other in