Of the Madison family, Cora probably suffered most; and this was the time when it was no advantage to have the front bedroom.  She had not slept until close upon dawn, and the hawkers woke her irreparably; she could but rage upon her hot pillow.  By and by, there came a token that another anguish kept company with hers.  She had left her door open for a better circulation of the warm and languid air, and from Hedrick’s room issued an “oof!” of agonized disgust.  Cora little suspected that the youth reeked not of newsboys:  Hedrick’s miseries were introspective.

The cries from the street were interminable; each howler in turn heard faintly in the distance, then in crescendo until he had passed and another succeeded him, and all the while Cora lay tossing and whispering between clenched teeth.  Having ample reason, that morning, to prefer sleep to thinking, sleep was impossible.  But she fought for it:  she did not easily surrender what she wanted; and she struggled on, with closed eyes, long after she had heard the others go down to breakfast.

About a hundred yards from her windows, to the rear, were the open windows of a church which fronted the next street, and stood dos-a-dos to the dwelling of the Madisons.  The Sunday-school hour had been advanced for the hot weather, and, partly on this account, and partly because of the summer absence of many families, the attendants were few.  But the young voices were conducted, rather than accompanied, in pious melody by a cornetist who worthily thought to amend, in his single person, what lack of volume this paucity occasioned.  He was a slender young man in hot black clothes; he wore the unfacaded collar fatally and unanimously adopted by all adam’s-apple men of morals; he was washed, fair, flat-skulled, clean-minded, and industrious; and the only noise of any kind he ever made in the world was on Sunday.

“Prashus joowuls, sweet joowuls, thee jams off iz crowowun,” sang the little voices feebly.  They were almost unheard; but the young man helped them out:  figuratively, he put them out.  And the cornet was heard:  it was heard for blocks and blocks; it was heard over all that part of the town—­in the vicinity of the church it was the only thing that could be heard.  In his daily walk this cornetist had no enemies:  he was kind-hearted; he would not have shot a mad dog; he gladly nursed the sick.  He sat upon the platform before the children; he swelled, perspired and blew, and felt that it was a good blowing.  If other thoughts vapoured upon the borders of his mind, they were of the dinner he would eat, soon after noon, at the house of one of the frilled, white-muslin teachers.  He was serene.  His eyes were not blasted; his heart was not instantly withered; his thin, bluish hair did not fall from his head; his limbs were not detached from his torso—­yet these misfortunes had been desired for him, with comprehension and sincerity, at the first flat blat of his brassy horn.