In the bottom of the cart lay something long and straight
and terrible, covered with a red shawl that drooped
over the end of the wagon; and on this thing were
piled the baskets in which the grocers had delivered
their orders for sugar and flour, and coffee and tea.
As the cart jolted through their lines, the boys could
no longer be restrained; they broke out with wild
yells, and danced madly about it, while the red shawl
hanging from the rigid feet nodded to their frantic
mirth; and the sun dropped its light through the maples
and shone bright upon the flooded date.
JUBILEE DAYS
I believe I have no good reason for including among
these suburban sketches my recollections of the Peace
Jubilee, celebrated by a monster musical entertainment
at Boston, in June, 1869; and I do not know if it
will serve as excuse for their intrusion to say that
the exhibition was not urban in character, and that
I attended it in a feeling of curiosity and amusement
which the Bostonians did not seem to feel, and which
I suspect was a strictly suburban if not rural sentiment.
I thought, on that Tuesday morning, as our horse-car
drew near the Long Bridge, and we saw the Coliseum
spectral through the rain, that Boston was going to
show people representing other parts of the country
her Notion of weather. I looked forward to a
forenoon of clammy warmth, and an afternoon of clammy
cold and of east wind, with a misty nightfall soaking
men to the bones. But the day really turned out
well enough; it was showery, but not shrewish, and
it smiled pleasantly at sunset, as if content with
the opening ceremonies of the Great Peace Jubilee.
The city, as we entered it, gave due token of excitement,
and we felt the celebration even in the air, which
had a holiday quality very different from that of
ordinary workday air. The crowds filled the decorous
streets, and the trim pathways of the Common and the
Public Garden, and flowed in an orderly course towards
the vast edifice on the Back Bay, presenting the interesting
points which always distinguish a crowd come to town
from a city crowd. You get so used to the Boston
face and the Boston dress, that a coat from New York
or a visage from Chicago is at once conspicuous to
you; and in these people there was not only this strangeness,
but the different oddities that lurk in out-of-way
corners of society everywhere had started suddenly
into notice. Long-haired men, popularly supposed
to have perished with the institution of slavery,
appeared before me, and men with various causes and
manias looking from their wild eyes confronted each
other, let alone such charlatans as had clothed themselves
quaintly or grotesquely to add a charm to the virtue
of whatever nostrum they peddled. It was, however,
for the most part, a remarkably well-dressed crowd;
and therein it probably differed more than in any other
respect from the crowd which a holiday would have
Copyrights
Suburban Sketches from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
