many lamps, still showed like a battle-field where the
inspectors groped among the scattered baggage like details from the
victorious army searching for the wounded. His son clapped him on the
shoulder when he suggested this notion, and said he was the same old
father; and they got home as gayly together as the dispiriting influences
of the New York ugliness would permit. It was still in those good and
decent times, now so remote, when the city got something for the money
paid out to keep its streets clean, and those they passed through were
not foul but merely mean.

The ignoble effect culminated when they came into Broadway, and found its
sidewalks, at an hour when those of any European metropolis would have
been brilliant with life, as unpeopled as those of a minor country town,
while long processions of cable-cars carted heaps of men and women up and
down the thoroughfare amidst the deformities of the architecture.

The next morning the March family breakfasted late after an evening
prolonged beyond midnight in spite of half-hourly agreements that now
they must really all go to bed. The children had both to recognize again
and again how well their parents were looking; Tom had to tell his father
about the condition of 'Every Other Week'; Bella had to explain to her
mother how sorry her husband was that he could not come on to meet them
with her, but was coming a week later to take her home, and then she
would know the reason why they could not all, go back to Chicago with
him: it was just the place for her father to live, for everybody to live.
At breakfast she renewed the reasoning with which she had maintained her
position the night before; the travellers entered into a full expression
of their joy at being home again; March asked what had become of that
stray parrot which they had left in the tree-top the morning they
started; and Mrs. March declared that this was the last Silver Wedding
Journey she ever wished to take, and tried to convince them all that she
had been on the verge of nervous collapse when she reached the ship. They
sat at table till she discovered that it was very nearly eleven o'clock,
and said it was disgraceful.

Before they rose, there was a ring at the door, and a card was brought in
to Tom. He glanced at it, and said to his father, "Oh, yes! This man has
been haunting the office for the last three days. He's got to leave
to-day, and as it seemed to be rather a case of life and death with