neck, and in less than a minute is sound and peacefully asleep without another whimper, utterly fagged out.  A square or so more and the conductor, who has had an unusually hard and uninterrupted day’s work, gets off for his first meal and relief since morning.  And now the white-hatted man, holding the slumbering babe, also acts as conductor the rest of the distance, keeping his eye on the passengers inside, who have by this time thinned out greatly.  He makes a very good conductor, too, pulling the bell to stop or to go on as needed, and seems to enjoy the occupation.  The babe meanwhile rests its fat cheeks close on his neck and gray beard, one of his arms vigilantly surrounding it, while the other signals, from time to time, with the strap; and the flushed mother inside has a good half hour to breathe, and to cool and recover herself.

II

No poem of our day dates and locates itself as absolutely as “Leaves of Grass;” but suppose it had been written three or four centuries ago, and had located itself in mediaeval Europe, and was now first brought to light, together with a history of Walt Whitman’s simple and disinterested life, can there be any doubt about the cackling that would at once break out in the whole brood of critics over the golden egg that had been uncovered?  This reckon would be a favorite passage with all:—­

 “You sea!  I resign myself to you also—­I guess what you mean;
  I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers;
  I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me;
  We must have a turn together—­I undress—­hurry me out of sight of
     the land;
  Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse;
  Dash me with amorous wet—­I can repay you.

 “Sea of stretch’d ground-swells! 
  Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths! 
  Sea of the brine of life! sea of unshovel’d yet always ready graves! 
  Howler and scooper of storms! capricious and dainty sea! 
  I am integral with you—­I too am of one phase, and of all phases.”

This other passage would afford many a text for the moralists and essayists:—­

 “Of persons arrived at high positions, ceremonies, wealth, scholarship,
     and the like;
  To me, all that those persons have arrived at sinks away from them,
     except as it results to their Bodies and Souls,
  So that often, to me, they appear gaunt and naked,
  And often, to me, each one mocks the others, and mocks himself
     or herself,
  And of each one, the core of life, namely happiness, is full of
     the rotten excrement of maggots;
  And often, to me, those men and women pass unwittingly the true
     realities of life, and go toward false realities,
  And often, to me, they are alive after what custom has served
     them, but nothing more,
  And often, to me, they are sad, hasty, unwaked somnambules,
     walking the dusk.”