When we went down-stairs, the woman was out on the platform, her yellow hair tossing about in the wind, and she seemed as happy with her meagre accommodations in the freight house as if she were owner of a mansion. She begged us to go in and get some of her apples, we were welcome, and "they did not cost me anything," she added. She told us more about her fellow-tenant, and said he paid half the rent, "and he used to board with us, but now he boards up in town, and he goes back and forth alone, his self." * * * * * This curious and pleasant little episode made us so ready to be interested in everything pertaining to brooms that it seemed a kind of sarcasm of circumstances when, at a junction not very far along our route, we saw, perched upon his cart, a pedler doing his best to sell his brooms to the crowd on their way home from one of the Cape camp-meetings. His words were just audible as the train went on: "Buy a broom! Buy a broom! Here's the place to buy a cheap broom, for _fourteen_ cents! _only_ fourteen cents! A broom for fourteen cents! So CHEAP!" And it happened not many days later that somebody read in our hearing that the broom-corn is a native of India, and that Dr. Franklin was the means of introducing it into this country; from seeing a whisk of it in the hands of a lady he began to examine it--being of an inquiring mind, as everybody knows--and found a seed, which he planted. The street-sweeper's broom is the genuine _besom_, made of birch stems, cut out in the country, and brought into town tied up in bundles like fagots; suitable enough for those stalwart men who drag them along so leisurely, but burdensome for the hands of the wretched little waifs, who, tattered and unkempt, make a pretence of keeping the crossings clean; who first sweep, and then hold out a small palm for the penny, dodging the horses' hoofs, and just escaping by a hair's breadth the wheels of truck or omnibus in their attempts to secure the coin, if some pitiful passer-by stops at the piping call: "Please ma'am, a penny!" That is the almost tragic prose of brooms. [Illustration: THE TRAGEDY OF BROOMS--THE CROSSING SWEEPER.]