men muttered “jail-bird,” jeering him for his forwardness.  “Load for Clinton!  Western Railroad!” sung out a sharp voice behind her, and, as she went into the street, a train of cars rushed into the hall to be loaded, and men swarmed out of every corner,—­red-faced and pale, whiskey-bloated and heavy-brained, Irish, Dutch, black, with souls half asleep somewhere, and the destiny of a nation in their grasp,—­hands, like herself, going through the slow, heavy work, for, as Pike the manager would have told you, “three dollars a week,—­good wages these tight times.”  For nothing more?  Some other meaning may have fallen from their faces into this girl’s quiet intuition in the instant’s glance,—­cheerfuller, remoter aims, hidden in the most sensual face,—­homeliest home-scenes, low climbing ambitions, some delirium of pleasure to come,—­whiskey, if nothing better:  aims in life like yours, differing in degree, needing only to make them the same——­did you say what?

She had reached the street now,—­a back-street, a crooked sort of lane rather, running between endless piles of ware-houses.  She hurried down it to gain the suburbs, for she lived out in the country.  It was a long, tiresome walk through the outskirts of the town, where the dwelling-houses were,—­long rows of two-story bricks drabbled with soot-stains.  It was two years since she had been in the town.  Remembering this, and the reason why she had shunned it, she quickened her pace, her face growing stiller than before.  One might have fancied her a slave putting on a mask, fearing to meet her master.  The town, being unfamiliar to her, struck her newly.  She saw the expression on its face better.  It was a large trading city, compactly built, shut in by hills.  It had an anxious, harassed look, like a speculator concluding a keen bargain; the very dwelling-houses smelt of trade, having shops in the lower stories; in the outskirts, where there are cottages in other cities, there were mills here; the trees, which some deluded dreamer had planted on the flat pavements, had all grown up into abrupt Lombardy poplars, knowing their best policy was to keep out of the way; the boys, playing marbles under them, played sharply “for keeps”; the bony old dray-horses, plodding through the dusty crowds, had speculative eyes, that measured their oats at night with a “you-don’t-cheat-me” look.  Even the churches had not the grave repose of the old brown house yonder in the hills, where the few field-people—­Arians, Calvinists, Churchmen—­ gathered every Sunday, and air and sunshine and God’s charity made the day holy.  These churches lifted their hard stone faces insolently, registering their yearly alms in the morning journals.  To be sure, the back-seats were free for the poor; but the emblazoned crimson of the windows, the carving of the arches, the very purity of the preacher’s style, said plainly that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a man in a red warm-us to enter the kingdom of heaven through that gate.