“But, my child, it’s tea-time already, and there’s a hop this evening. You had better wait till morning.”
“Mother, I so much want to go now. The train leaves in fifteen minutes. I don’t care for the hop, anyway; it’s too warm to dance. Please, mother?”
Of course impulsive little Pet had her way, and was soon whirling along toward the city, with a strong resolve in her mind.
“I’ll walk up to auntie’s from the depot, and to-morrow I’ll go down to North Street with uncle.”
The train stopped at all the small stations, and was delayed by various causes, so that it was quite dark when she started on her walk. She was glad, after all, to find the streets well-lighted, and filled with respectable-looking people.
On reaching Washington Street, however, everything appeared weird and unnatural. The sidewalks along which one could hardly pass in the daytime, for the crowd, were nearly deserted. All the spots that were bright by sunlight, were now dark, and all the ordinarily dark places light. It was exactly like the negative of a photograph, and gave Pet a sense of looking on the wrong side of everything. Once she saw something move behind the broad plate-glass windows of a railroad agency, on a corner that in the daytime was a business centre. She approached, and was startled to find the object a huge rat, trotting silently about, over the polished engravings and placards, behind the glass, a very spirit of solitude and evil. It was all like a nightmare, and she began most heartily to wish herself back at the Everglades, dancing the Lancers with cousin Mark.
Coincidences happen; not in stories simply, but in real life. The vessel is wrecked in sight of port; the day the owner dies; the man we meet on the steamboat at the headwaters of the Saguenay River, has, unknown to us until then, ate, drank, and slept in the next house all winter, within ten feet of us; the dear friend we have known so long, is at last discovered to be intimate with that other dear friend we love so well, and finally it comes out that all three of us were born in the same little town in New Hampshire.
Now the coincidence that happened on this particular evening was as follows:
While Pet was making her way along Washington Street in the dark, another girl about thirteen years of age, named Bridget Flanagan, was standing on the third gallery of the Crystal Palace, in the same good city of Boston, looking down into Lincoln Street. Like Pet, she was wondering whether anything could be done to aid the poor. Not that any such words passed through her mind. Dear me, no! I doubt if she would have even known what “aid” meant, that word being in her mind associated solely with lemons of a shrivelled and speckled character. If she had spoken her thoughts, which she sometimes had a queer way of doing, she might have said something like this: “Don’t I wish I could git out o’ this! An’ the rich folks wid all the money they wants, an’ nothin’ to do but buy fans an’ use ’em up. My! ain’t it hot?”
It was hot. There was a man playing on a bag-pipe in the street below, and not only had a crowd of children and idlers surrounded him as he stood before a brilliantly lighted (and licensed) liquor store, but the long rickety galleries which run in front of each floor in the “Palace” were full of half-dressed, red-faced women and children, who leaned on the dirty railing and listened to the music, just as the guests at the “Everglades” at the same time were listening to their orchestra of a dozen pieces.