In this commercial age there is little room for sentiment. A people that will permit the fair face of Nature to be disfigured by the painter of patent medicine ads; that will gaze calmly upon a pictured ham or the announcement of the birth of a new “liver-pad” on the Palisades; that will tolerate on our boulevards flaming advertisements of the latest thing in corsets or “union suits,” is not likely to protest against a Death’s head that merely grins over the gate of a charnel house. And yet the people know. They have read of the awful things that lie behind that awful grin. Many of them have suffered, still more have seen. A few, a very few, go by on the other side of the street with suffused eyes averted, and great sobs of agony welling up in their throats. “An’ I should live a thousand years,” I could not forget. Many horrible sights had I seen; much suffering had I witnessed; the faces of the dead had long since ceased to be a novelty to me and were no longer awesome;--I fancied I had grown callous. But that awful fire! Would that I could blunt the memory of it. Would that I might shelve it as but another experience in the land of Work-a-day. As I looked upon the Death’s head, it seemed to single me out from the crowd, leering at me triumphantly. Did it note my emotion and gloat over it? I raged inwardly and was tempted to--But, had I seized a paving stone and smashed that vile image to bits, I could not have made them understand. Least of all could I have compelled the understanding of that huge policeman, who stood idly by, swinging his club in a way that suggested danger to sentimental cranks. When that team of horses swung around the corner, narrowly missing a woman who, bundles in arms and children at her side, was frantically trying to cross the street, the officer was gazing at a figure of Gambrinus in the saloon window across the way. He had appetites, but no sentiment, that man in blue. Standing there in the street, jostled and elbowed by the surging crowd that had no time for dreaming, there rose before me a picture which the Death’s head also saw;--its expression showed that.