They came out of church to the glorious strains of the Hallelujah chorus sung by the choir of the church, supplemented by men and women and a glorious orchestra. Beth lingered so slowly along that the others far outstripped her, impeded though they all were by the throngs which had filled every available space in the church. Uncle Jim turned back to find her. He found her forgetful of all around her, slipped into a vacant pew, drinking in the volume of glorious sound pouring over her as, from side to side, the voices tossed and repeated the Hallelujahs of Handel’s grand chorus. Uncle Jim tucked Beth’s hand into his arm and waited with her till it was sung. “I don’t blame you, Bethie, for clinging to the last note of the Hallelujah chorus. Some day you must hear the whole oratorio from which it is taken--the oratorio of the Messiah. Now we must go, dear. It is all over,” he said. Uncle Jim brought Beth out into the flooding light of noon on an early spring day in the broad thoroughfare of bright New York. The little girl blinked; she was returning, not merely to the strong sunshine, out of the dim church, but into the actual world from vague visions of angels and celestial glories. Yet the world around her was beautiful and wonderful, too, for the avenue was dense with people going slowly in two distinct streams up and down, north and south, on the outer and inner sides of the sidewalk. Uncle Jim skilfully steered his family into the descending line on the inner side, and Beth found herself part of “the Easter parade.” Occasionally the Cortlandts passed some one whom they knew, but rarely. The crowd was made up of people from another world within the great city. There were sharp-faced, pert girls in the extreme of grotesque fashions; many foreign faces; families headed by women who looked like overgrown heads of cabbage decked out in flower petals, so blowsy were they, yet so gay in what they considered spring finery. Many of the faces bore the stamp of privation and a hard tussle to live; they showed that there must have been self-denial in necessities to get together the money to buy the luxuries of Easter garments. The girls wore the highest heeled pumps, the thinnest of stockings, the narrowest of skirts, the closest of hats, with stiffest feathers extending out at the rear, as was the fashion of that spring. It was a caricature of style; these girls who worked hard for their living were bound to prove that they knew “the latest thing from Paris” as well as their more fortunate sisters. But every one, however tawdry her finery, wore a bunch of flowers on her jacket. Sometimes they were artificial flowers, but usually they were fragrant violets and roses, or long-stemmed carnations. Even the young men from the East Side had a blossom in their buttonholes and swaggered along, to prove they were at ease in this famous avenue of wealth, with a bit of spring fragrance abloom upon them.