The low thunder of a thousand feet:  tired feet, eager feet; flat feet; shabby feet; young feet; callous feet; arched and archless feet.  Voices that rose like wind to a gale.  A child dragged by the arm and whimpering.  A group of shawled strangers interchanging sharp jargon.

Within the marble mausoleum of a waiting-room, its benches lined with the kaleidoscopic faces of the traveling public, a train-announcer bellowed a paean of tracks and stations.

At the onyx-and-nickel-plated periodical stand men in passing snatched their evening paper from off the stack of the counter, flopping down their pennies as they ran.  In the glow of a spray of red and white electric bulbs, in a bower of the instant’s pretty-girl periodical covers, and herself the most vivid of them all, Miss Marjorie Clark caught a hastily flung copper coin on the fly, her laughter mounting with it.

“Whoops, la-la!”

“Good catch, kiddo.”

“Oh, you Charley-boy, who was you pitching for last season?”

“The Reds, because that’s your color.”

“Say, if you’re going to catch that four-eighteen you’ve got to break somebody’s speed limit between here and track ten.  Run along, Charley-boy, and Merry Christmas.”

But Mr. Charles Scully swung to a halt, poured his armful of packages into a wire basket of six-city-postcard-views for ten cents, swung open his overcoat with a sprinkling of snow on its slick-napped velvet collar, lifted his small black mustache in a smile.

“Black-eyes, I’d miss three trains for you.”

“There’s not another until the four-forty.”

“I should worry.  Anyway, for all I know you’ve changed your mind and are coming out with me to-night, little one.”

The quick blood ran up into her small face, dyeing it, and she withdrew from his nearing features.

“I have not!  Gee! you’re about as square as a doughnut, you are.”

“Jumping Juniper, can’t a fellow miss his train just to wish a little beauty like you a Merry Christmas?  But on the level, I want to take you out home with me to-night; honest I do, little spitfire.”

“Crank up there, Charley-boy; you got about thirty seconds to make that train in.”

“Gets you sore every time I ask you out, don’t it, black-eyes?  Talk about your little tin saints!”

“Say, if you was any slicker you’d slide.”

“You can’t scare me with those black eyes.”

“Can’t I, my brave boy!  Say, you’d want to quarantine the dictionary if you found smallpox in it, that’s how hard you are to scare.”

“Well, of all the lines of talk, if you ’ain’t got the greatest.  Cute is no name for you.”

“And say, the place where you clerk must be a classy clothes-parlor, Charley-boy.”

“Right-o, little one.  If you ever pass by the Brown Haberdashery, on Twenty-third Street, drop in, and I’ll buy you a lunch.”

“Tra-la!  Where did you get that checked suit?  And I’ll bet you flag the train out at Glendale, where you live, with that tie.  Oh, you Checkers!”