They saw the usual Fifth Avenue crowd. They saw the full-fed, clock-hating faces of professional idlers; the drawn features of the busy money-maker with his perennial anxieties; the suddenly immobilized grimaces of millionaires intended to conceal the fear of God knew what; the contemptuous countenances of waiters from fashionable restaurants, who, like ordained priests, knew America at its worst, but, unlike priests, could not pity; healthy American boys with clean faces and the eyes of animals. And the sexless marchers saw also healthy American girls with delicate features and dreadful, price-quoting eyes, and faces not clean and healthy, but dead-white and dead-crimson; they saw not women's faces, but marble tombstones on which the epitaphs were scarlet letters that told what the price was, so that the professional prostitutes no longer wasted time advertising with the same ink, but used downcast eyes as bait. There was a gap of about thirty feet between the first detachment of Rutgers's marching advertisements and the next. The spectators, seeking explanations, saw a cadaverous-looking man, hollow-cheeked, sunken-eyed, white-lipped, who stepped as though the avenue were full of puddles of nitroglycerine--uncertainly, fearfully! And this death-on-foot carried a white-cloth board black-bordered like a funeral-card. And thereon money-makers and money-spenders, clubmen and waiters, shop-girls and millionairesses--all Fifth Avenue!--saw this: HAIL, NEW YORK! WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO DIE SALUTE YOU! There followed another gap of thirty feet, so that the valedictorian of the doomed might be seen of all. Then came eighty-odd sandwich-bearers, appositely legended. From time to time the valedictorian would stagger as you have seen horses do on their last trip to the glue-factory. Whereupon a couple of the non-descripts behind him would shuffle up and endeavor to uphold him. And the others slouched on, deep-eyed, gaunt, famine-stricken, rum-ravaged, disease-smitten--ex-bookkeepers, and superannuated mechanics, and disgraced yeggmen, and former merchants--and former men, too! At Thirty-ninth Street a young woman dressed richly but in perfect taste stood on the very corner. Her hair had glints of sunshine and her eyes were like twin heavens, clean, and clear, and blue, and infinitely deep. And the Madonna face saw the Death face, looked at the thing that had been a man, and read his salutation. And in one of the pauses of the "Funeral March" a thousand people heard her laugh, and heard her exclaim with a contagious relish, spiced with undisguised admiration: "_If that ain't the limit!_" New York had spoken!