“As luck had it, one night the wind come up cool, and, the woman bein’ dead tired, never woke up to notice it, and in the morning little Billy set up a terrible cry, for when he tried to get up he couldn’t, for the wind had checked the sweat and stiffened his left leg, as it were. Of course we had a big time and had in full a dozen doctors, and some said one thing and some another, but they all give it the one name ‘the infant paralysis.’
“The doctors they wanted him to go to the ’ospital and have the leg shut into a frame and all that, but I said ’twas a shame to torment him, and I’d have him let be till he could say for himself.
“The woman takes him awful hard, though, as if he was a reproach to her for not wakin’ up, which is no sense, for what be’s to be, be’s—that’s all,” which shiftless argument Bird afterward found was her uncle’s answer to many things that could have been bettered.
“I hope Billy will like me,” said Bird, half to herself after a few minutes’ silence; “somehow I think I like him already.”
“If you do that and act well by him, I buy you a hat with the longest feather on Broadway for your Christmas,” said O’More, grasping her slender fingers and almost crushing them in his burst of enthusiasm. “But whist a minute, girl, for we’re most home now. If the woman,—I mean my missis, your Aunt Rosy,—is offish just at the start, don’t get down-hearted, for you see as she don’t expect I’m bringing you, she may be—well—a trifle startled like. She’ll soon settle down and take what be’s to be straight enough,” and with this rather discouraging remark the train crossed the Harlem River and entered the long tunnel that is apt to cast a gloom over every one’s first entrance to New York, even when they are bent on pleasure and not sad and lonely.
“We’re in now,” said O’More in a few minutes, as the echo of the close walls ceased and the train slid across a maze of tracks into an immense building with a glass roof like a greenhouse.
“Grand Central Station—all out,” called a brakeman, and Bird found herself part of a crowd of men, women, children, and red-capped porters moving toward a paved street, full of carriages, wagons, trucks, electric cars, besides many sort of vehicles that she had never seen before, coming, going, dashing here and there in confusion, while on every side there was a wall of houses, and below the earth was upturned and trenched, not a bit of grass or tree to be seen anywhere, and the sky, oh, so far away and small. Bird almost fell as she stumbled blindly along toward a trolley car after the uncle, for what could seem more unreal to this little wild thrush from the country lane, with song in her throat, and love of beauty and colour born in her heart, than Forty-second Street in the middle of the first warm summer afternoon?
******
The car they boarded went through another short tunnel, and on every side could be heard the noise of hammers or drilling in the rock.
“Is this a stone quarry?” asked Bird, innocently, not understanding, and wondering why the near-by passengers smiled as her uncle replied: “Lord bless yer! no; it’s the subway, a road below ground they’re building to let out folks from where they work to where there’s room to live; there’s such push here below town there’s little room for sitting, let alone sleeping. Oh, but it’s a fine city is New York, all the same.”