It is about one o’clock, and people are thronging into Broad Street. They are thronging before the Town Hall, with its ornamental glazed-brick façade, its pointed towers and turrets mounting toward a whitish grey sky, its covered steps supported on outstanding columns, its pointed arcades, through which there is a glimpse of the market-place and the fountain. The crowd stands steadfastly in the dirty slush that melts beneath their feet; they look into each other’s faces and then straight ahead again, and crane their necks. For beyond that portal, in the Council Room, in fourteen arm-chairs arranged in a semicircle sit the electors, who have been chosen from the Senate and the Assembly and await the proposals of the voting chambers. The affair has spun itself out. It appears that the debate in the chambers will not die down; the struggle is so bitter that up to now not one single unanimous choice has been put before the Council--otherwise the Burgomaster would at once announce an election. Extraordinary! Rumours--nobody knows whence, nobody knows how--come from within the building and circulate in the street. Perhaps Herr Kaspersen, the elder of the two beadles, who always refers to himself as a “servant of the State,” is standing inside there and telling what he hears, out of the corner of his mouth, through his shut teeth, with his eyes turned the other way! The story goes that proposals have been laid before the sitting, but that each of the three chambers has turned in a different name: namely Hagenström, Kistenmaker, and Buddenbrook. A secret ballot must now be taken, with ballot-papers--it is to be hoped that it will show a clear plurality! For people without overshoes are suffering, and stamping their feet to warm them. The waiting crowd is made up of all sorts and conditions. There are sea-faring characters, with bare tattoed necks and their hands in the pockets of their sailor trousers; grain-porters with their incomparably respectable countenances, and their blouses and knee-breeches of black glazed calico; drivers who have clambered down from their wagons of piled-up sacks, and stand whip in hand to wait for the decision; servant-maids in neckerchiefs, aprons and thick striped petticoats with little white caps perched on the backs of their heads and market-baskets hanging on their bare arms; fish and vegetable women with their flat straw baskets--even a couple of pretty farm girls with Dutch caps, short skirts, and long flowing sleeves coming out from their gaily-embroidered stay-bodies. Mingled among these, burghers, shop-keepers who have come out hatless from neighbouring shops to exchange their views, sprucely-dressed young men who are apprentices in the business of their fathers or their fathers’ friends--and schoolboys with satchels and bundles of books.