"_Jour-nal_, gentlemen! Eve-nin' 'dition! Georgy out!" ("What's that?" exclaims an inconsiderate.) "Georgy out! (Little brother o' mine. Seen him anywhere?) Eve-nin' 'dition! _Jour-nal_, gentleman!" and the shivering little candy girl, threading her way with a silent imploringness among the throng--were bustling up and down, in waiting rooms, and on the platforms, till one would think, assuredly, that the center of all the world's activity, at this moment, lay here; and that everybody _not_ going in this particular express train to New York, must be utterly devoid of any aim or object in life, whatever. So we do, always, carry our center about with us. A little while ago all the world was buying dolls and tin horses. Horizons shift and ring themselves about us, and we, ourselves, stand always in the middle. By and by, however, the last call was heard. "Passengers for New York! Train ready! All aboard!" And with the ringing of the bell, and the mighty gasping of the impatient engine, and a scuffle and scurry of a minute, in which carpetbags and babies were gathered up and shouldered indiscriminately, the rooms and the platforms were suddenly cleared of all but a few stragglers, and half a dozen women with Christmas bundles, who sat waiting for trains to way stations. Two little pinched faces, purple with the bitter cold, looked in at the door. "It's good and warm in there. Less' go!" And the older drew the younger into the room, toward the glowing stove. They looked as if they had been wandering about in the dreary streets till the chill had touched their very bones. The larger of the two, a boy--torn hopelessly as to his trousers, dilapidated to the last degree as to his fragment of a hat--knees and elbows making their way out into the world with the faintest shadow of opposition--had, perhaps from this, a certain look of pushing knowingness that set itself, by the obscure and inevitable law of compensation, over against the gigantic antagonism of things he found himself born into; and you knew, as you looked at him, that he would, somehow, sooner or later, make his small dint against the great dead wall of society that loomed itself in his way; whether society or he should get the worst of it, might happen as it would. The younger was a little girl. A flower thrown down in the dirt. A jewel encrusted with mean earth. Little feet in enormous coarse shoes, cracked and trodden down; bare arms trying to hide themselves under a bit of old woolen shawl; hair tangled beneath a squalid hood; out from amidst all, a face of beauty that peeped, like an unconscious draft of God's own signing, upon humanity. Was there none to acknowledge it? An official came through the waiting room. The boy showed a slink in his eyes, like one used to shoving and rebuff, and to getting off, round corners. The girl stood, innocent and unheeding. "There! out with you! No vagrums here!"