BLUE BONNETS OVER THE BORDER.
One morning, about the 1st of June, 1861, in the city of New York, two men of the mercantile class came from a cross street into Broadway, near what was then the upper region of its wholesale stores. They paused on the corner, near the edge of the sidewalk.
“Even when the States were seceding,” said one of them, “I couldn’t make up my mind that they really meant to break up the Union.”
He had rosy cheeks, a retreating chin, and amiable, inquiring eyes. The other had a narrower face, alert eyes, thin nostrils, and a generally aggressive look. He did not reply at once, but, after a quick glance down the great thoroughfare and another one up it, said, while his eyes still ran here and there:—
“Wonderful street, this Broadway!”
He straightened up to his fullest height and looked again, now down the way, now up, his eye kindling with the electric contagion of the scene. His senses were all awake. They took in, with a spirit of welcome, all the vast movement: the uproar, the feeling of unbounded multitude, the commercial splendor, the miles of towering buildings; the long, writhing, grinding mass of coming and going vehicles, the rush of innumerable feet, and the countless forms and faces hurrying, dancing, gliding by, as though all the world’s mankind, and womankind, and childhood must pass that way before night.
“How many people, do you suppose, go by this corner in a single hour?” asked the man with the retreating chin. But again he got no answer. He might as well not have yielded the topic of conversation as he had done; so he resumed it. “No, I didn’t believe it,” he said. “Why, look at the Southern vote of last November—look at New Orleans. The way it went there, I shouldn’t have supposed twenty-five per cent. of the people would be in favor of secession. Would you?”
But his companion, instead of looking at New Orleans, took note of two women who had come to a halt within a yard of them and seemed to be waiting, as he and his companion were, for an opportunity to cross the street. The two new-comers were very different in appearance, the one from the other. The older and larger was much beyond middle life, red, fat, and dressed in black stuff, good as to fabric, but uncommonly bad as to fit. The other was young and pretty, refined, tastefully dressed, and only the more interesting for the look of permanent anxiety that asserted itself with distinctness about the corners of her eyes and mouth. She held by the hand a rosy, chubby little child, that seemed about three years old, and might be a girl or might be a boy, so far as could be discerned by masculine eyes. The man did not see this fifth member of their group until the elder woman caught it under the arms in her large hands, and, lifting it above her shoulder, said, looking far up the street:—
“O paypy, paypy, choost look de fla-ags! One, two, dtree,—a tuzzent, a hundut, a dtowsant fla-ags!”
Evidently the child did not know her well. The little face remained without a smile, the lips sealed, the shoulders drawn up, and the legs pointing straight to the spot whence they had been lifted. She set it down again.