The World Of Chance. William Dean Howells

to the exclusion of all other sounds. Some of the people pressed into the cabin; others stood smiling in the benediction of the artless strain. Ray followed his idyllic sisters within, and saw an old negro, in the middle of the cabin floor, lounging in an easy pose, with his hat in one hand and the other hand on his hip, while his thick lips poured out those mellow notes, which might have come from the heart of some thrush-haunted wild wood. When the sylvan music ceased, and the old negro, with a roll of his large head, and a twist of his burly shape, began to limp round the circle, everyone put something in his hat. Ray threw in a nickel, and he saw the sisters, who faced him from the other side of the circle, conferring together. The younger had the bill in her hand which Ray had sent them by the conductor to pay their car fares home. She parleyed a moment with the negro when he reached them, and he took some of the silver from his hat and changed the bill for her. She gave him a quarter back. He ducked his head, and said, " Thank yeh, miss," and passed on.

      The transaction seemed to amuse some of the bystanders, and Ray heard one of them, who stood near him, say: " Well, that's the coolest thing I've seen yet I should have about as soon thought of asking the deacon to change a bill for me when he came round with the plate in church. Well, it takes all kinds to make a world! "

      He looked like a country merchant, on a first business visit to the city; his companion, who had an air of smart ease, as of a man who had been there often, said:

      " It takes all kinds to make a town like New York. You'll see queerer things than that before you get home. If that old darkey makes much on that transaction, I'm no judge of human nature."

      " Pshaw! You don't mean it wasn't a good bill? "

      The two men lost themselves in the crowd now pressing out of the cabin door. The boat was pushing into her slip. She bumped from one elastic side to the other, and settled with her nose at the wharf. The snarl of the heavy chains that held her fast was heard; the people poured off and the hollow thunder of the hoofs and wheels of the disembarking teams began. Ray looked about for a last glimpse of the two young women and their babies; but he could not see them.

      IV.

      Rat carried his bag himself when he left the elevated road, and resisted the offer of the small Italian dodging about his elbow, and proposing to take it, after he had failed to get Ray to let him black his boots. The young man rather prided himself on his thrift in. denying the boy, whose naked foot came half through one of his shoes; he saw his tatters and nakedness with the indifference of inexperience, and with his country breeding he considered his frugality a virtue. His senses were not offended by the foulness of the streets he passed through, or hurt by their sordid uproar; his strong young nerves were equal to all the assaults that the city could make; and his heart was lifted in a dream of hope. He was going to a hotel that Sanderson had told him of, where you could get a room, on the European plan, for seventy-five cents, and then eat wherever you pleased; he had gone to an American hotel when he was in New York before, and he thought he could make a saving by trying Sanderson's. It had a certain gayety of lamps before it, but the splendor diminished within, and Ray's pride was further hurt by the clerk's exacting advance payment for his room from him. The clerk said he could not give him an outside room that night, but he would try to change him in the morning; and Ray had either to take the one assigned him or go somewhere else. But he had ordered his trunk sent to this hotel by the express, and he did not know how he should manage about that if he left; so he stayed, and had himself shown to his room. It seemed to be a large cupboard in the wall of the corridor; but it had a window near the bed, and the usual equipment of stand and bureau, and Ray did not see why he should not sleep very well there. Still, he was glad that his friends at Midland could none of them see him in that room, and he resolved to leave the hotel as soon as he could the next day. It did not seem the place for a person who had left Midland with the highest social honors that could be paid a young man. He hurried through the hotel office when he came out, so as not to be seen by any other Midlander that might happen to be there, and he went down to the basement, where the clerk said the restaurant was, and got his supper. When he had finished his oyster stew he started towards the street-door, but was overtaken at the threshold by a young man who seemed to have run after him, and who said, " You didn't pay for your supper."

      Ray said, " Oh, I forgot it," and he went back to his table and got his check, and paid at the counter, where he tried in vain to impress the man who took his money with a sense of his probity by his profuse apologies. Apparently, they were too used to such tricks at that restaurant. The man said nothing, but he looked as if he did not believe him, and Ray was so abashed that he stole back to his room, and tried to forget what had happened in revising the manuscript of his story. He was always polishing it; he had written it several times over, and at every moment he got the reconstructed sentences in it, and tried to bring the style up to his ideal of style; he wavered a little between the style of Thackeray and the style of Hawthorne, as an ideal. It made him homesick, now, to go over the familiar pages: they put him so strongly in mind of Midland, and the people of the kindly city. The pages smelt a little of Sanderson's cigar smoke; he wished that Sanderson would come to New York; he perceived that they had also a fainter reminiscence of the perfume he associated with that girl who had found him out in his story; and then he thought how he had been in the best society at Midland, and it seemed a great descent from the drawing-rooms where he used to call on all those nice girls to this closet in a fourth-rate New York hotel. His story appeared to share his downfall; he thought it cheap and poor; he did not believe now that he should ever get a publisher for it. He cowered to think how scornfully he had thought the night before of his engagement with the Hanks Brothers to write letters for the Midland Echo; he was very glad he had so good a basis; he wondered how far he could make five dollars a week go toward supporting him in New York; he could not bear to encroach upon his savings, and yet he probably must. In Midland, you could get very good board for five dollars a week.

      He determined to begin a letter to the Echo at once; and he went to open the window to give himself some air in the close room; but he found that it would not open. He pulled down the transom over his door to keep from stifling in the heat of his gas-burner, and some voices that had been merely a dull rumbling before now made themselves heard in talk which Ray could not help listening to.

      Two men were talking together, one very hopelessly, and the other in a vain attempt to cheer him from time to time. The comforter had a deep base voice, and was often unintelligible; but the disheartened man spoke nervously, in a high key of plangent quality, like that of an unhappy bell.

      " No," he said; " I'd better fall, Bill. It's no use trying to keep along. I can get pretty good terms from the folks at home, there; they all know me, and they know I done my best. I can pay about fifty cents on the dollar, I guess, and that's more than most businessmen could, if they stopped; and if I ever get goin' again, I'll pay dollar for dollar; they know that."

      The man with the deep voice said something that Ray did not catch. The disheartened man seemed not to have caught it either; he said, " What say? " and , when the other repeated his words, he said: " Oh yes! I know. But I been dancing round in a quart cup all my life there; and now it's turning into a pint cup, and I guess I better get out The place did grow for a while, and we got all ready to be a city as soon as the railroad come along. But when the road come, it didn't do all we expected of it. We could get out into the world a good deal easier than we could before, and we had all the facilities of transportation that we could ask for. But we could get away so easy that most of our people went to the big towns to do their trading, and the facilities for transportation carried off most of our local industries. The luck was against us. We bet high on what the road would do for us, and we lost. We paid out nearly our last dollar to get the road to come our way, and it came, and killed us. We subscribed to the stock, and we've got it yet; there ain't any fight for it anywhere else; we'd let it go without a fight We tried one while for the car shops, but they located them further up the line, and since that we ha'n't even wiggled. What say? Yes; but, you see, I'm part of the place. I've worked hard all my life, and I've held out a good many times when ruin stared me in the face, but I guess I sha'n't hold out this time. What's the use? Most every businessman I know has failed some time or other; some of 'em three or four times over, and scrambled up and gone on