“Nothing,” he replied, smiling, and bending his head to Emily. “It’s a false alarm, I find. But these poor people are very much excited, and I was going up to quiet them.”
“Come in. We’re going to Roux’s,” said Muriel.
Harrington entered, sat in Tugmutton’s place, taking him on his knee, and the carriage went on till it reached the corner of Southac street, where it stopped.
“There’s considerable of a crowd here,” cried the driver.
They all looked out at the carriage window upon the squalid neighborhood. Only a Dickens or a Victor Hugo could fitly describe the strange and picturesque scene which met their eyes. Huddled together in excited groups, or moving hither and thither in straggling masses, hundreds of colored men and women, clad in every variety of costume, and lawless and unhuman in aspect, swarmed over the street with a loud, dense inarticulate confusion of voices, the bright sunlight bringing out their motley forms and bronze faces in grotesque and vivid salience. So uncouth and various were the costumes—coats and hats of extinct styles and patterns, frowsy and shabby raiment of every fashion within the last half century, intermingling with the many-colored gowns and head-dresses of the girls and women—that but for the heavy-lipped, sombre faces, with their flashing teeth and wild-rolling eyes, and the menacing gestures and threatening hum of the multitude, it might have seemed some masquerading mob, arrayed in the garments of the old clothes shops. Protruding from every window in the dingy and dilapidated houses on either side of the street, big clusters of heads, mostly those of women and children, some with great shocks of wool, some bullet-shaped and closely shorn, some wearing white mob caps and red and yellow bandanna kerchiefs, were bobbing restlessly over the excited multitude below. Up and down cellar-ways, and in and out of numerous alleys and yawning doors, uneasy shoals were constantly pouring, passing from or mingling with the mongrel and fantastic concourse in the street, which continually moved in the sunlight with a hoarse, turbulent, swarming undertone, like the far-off roar of insurrection.
A deep flush came to the broad-nostrilled face of Harrington as he gazed.
“What a sight for Boston in the nineteenth century!” he exclaimed. “Vaunting her civilization while terror invades the refuge of her poor!”
Emily, deathly pale, leaned back in the carriage, and shuddered.
At that moment, a portion of the crowd, seeing the carriage, set up a clamor of cries, and surged down toward it. Two or three stones were thrown, which rattled on the pavement around the vehicle, and the horses began to plunge and rear. Instantly Muriel flung open the carriage-door, and springing into the street, calm and fearless, held up her hand. Harrington quickly leaped out after her.
“Halloa, there!” he shouted, with a commanding voice, which, like Muriel’s gesture, fell like magic upon the thoughtless assailants. He was well known in the quarter, and the negroes recognizing a friend, set up a cheer of welcome. Tugmutton meanwhile had pounced from the carriage upon the boys that threw the stones, and assaulted them with a shower of cuffs and kicks. He came back, presently, full of victory, his blobber cheeks puffed out with rage and self-importance.