Her head out beneath the raised window-sash, her companion forgotten as though he had never existed, Daisy wrapped herself in the joy of the hour. The white house-line, advancing along the angle of its perspective, broadened and took form and character, split into rays of streets, discovered great chimneys with smoke-plumes, unveiled square buildings in a caparison of glittering windows, began to live and move and give forth human signs. The first workers were already in the streets, for a goose-herd of city whistles was croaking out seven, vying therein with the warning blast of the "flyer's" engine as, barely slackening speed, it rushed along the cobweb of tracks, arrogant and favored possessor, for the time being, of the right of way to the great urban station in the heart of all. "Well, kid," said the voice of Beatty, "how d'ye like it?" "Fine, Freddie," Daisy replied, blithely. The comment was plain and simple enough; but her eyes and cheeks told the rest, without need of words. Beatty stuck on his hat, tilting it a little. "It ain't so bad, either," he conceded, grinning to himself, as he picked up his smart leather suitcase and Daisy's battered telescope grip, "not so bad, at that, kiddo." With a hollow, drumlike roar, the train drew to a halt beneath a dome of glass and iron; and Daisy and her companion, inching along behind the file of passengers, at length emerged upon a cement walk, walled in on either side by the bulk of varnished railway coaches. Passing along this, descending a stair with an iron balustrade, and proceeding through a great, busy, and echoing rotunda with a ceiling almost as far away as a sky, Daisy and her companion emerged upon a stretch of granolithic pavement. Beyond the curb, a bevy of bus-drivers from city hotels crowed like a flock of roosters--the surmounting voice in this bedlam being that of a sandy-mustached old-timer, whose vehicle was labelled "Imperial Hotel." By his hind-wheel he stood, moving nothing but the hinges of his jaws; and to see his mouth open to its red limit was to be filled with consternation. "Imm-Peary-ail Hoat'l!" he sang, his eyes looking nonchalantly up and away, with something of the expression he used to wear when scouting the sky for signs of rain, in the old farming days before he became poet laureate of the city's pioneer hotel. "Why--look who's here, will you!" The exclamation was Beatty's, as he stopped alongside the scratched old bus. "This is him, Mrs. Beatty--old Jim-Jam Hogle. Can you take a passenger, J. J.?"