Knowing this, WE HOPE! An octogenarian, not over four and one-half feet tall, very frail-looking, was next. To him H. Rutgers had assigned this banner: If Society won't feed us We'll feed the Society of Worms-- POTTER'S FIELD Under a big foot--property of a popular chiropodist on lower Broadway; terms twenty-five cents per, five for a dollar--was this: We are the World's Unfortunates: BORN TO BE KICKED! Then followed a haggard-faced man who looked like an exaggerated picture of poverty. He carried: There are poorer than we. HELP THEM! A man with the stride of a conqueror bore a banner: AND STILL WE BELIEVE IN GOD! The crowd looked puzzled. What the dickens did believing in God have to do with anything? To end the bother of thinking they looked at the next one. Look at Fifth Avenue! WHY? See what we are! WHY? They obeyed. They saw Fifth Avenue. Why? They did not know why. And then they saw what the sandwich-men were. And they wondered why the sandwich-men asked why. Why not? Pshaw! The placard that followed was: If you wish to see One hundred starving men Follow us. YOU WILL REMEMBER IT! Say, that was something that nobody had seen and therefore everybody could joke about. Every woman had the same remark and the same grin: "Haven't I seen my husband?" Before the parade had gone half a square Fifth Avenue was blocked. Apart from the interference of the band and the sandwiches with vehicular traffic, there was the paralysis of the pedestrians. The Peacock Parade halted. Slim figures, half-naked, flat-bosomed, stalked swayingly to the curb and stared with eyes in which was the insolent sex challenge that New York males answer with furs and jewels. And as they looked the challenge of sex died in the eyes of the women: the marchers had no sex; anybody could see they had no money! And the men, too, ceased to look stallion-eyed at the women and gazed on the parade of sandwich-men, who, in the middle of the street, with the machines and the horses, slouched on--almost rubbing valuable varnish on automobiles and carriages, careless beasts! Presently the hurrying crowds slowed their gait and kept step to Chopin's dirge--_slowly! slowly!_--until all Fifth Avenue was a vast funeral procession; only the marchers could not have told you what it was that long since had died of gold on Fifth Avenue! Slowly! Slowly! And with the funereal gait other changes came--in the grimace of the over-red lips and the look of the over-bold eyes. But never the slightest change in the color of the cheeks, which was there to stay, in rain, shine, or snow. "What is it? What is it?" whispered ten thousand people. From the middle of the street it sounded like the whimper of ten thousand little foamy waves dying on a flat beach. It made the filthy bipeds who marched look at the thronged sidewalks.