Domestic fiction; Short stories; Suburban life -- Fiction
There was good hearing outside for those that desired to listen to the
music, with seats to let in the surrounding tents and booths; and there
was unlimited seeing for the mere looker-on. At least fifty thousand
people seemed to have come to the Jubilee with no other purpose than
to gaze upon the outside of the building. The crowd was incomparably
greater than that of the day before; all the main thoroughfares of the
city roared with a tide of feet that swept through the side streets, and
swelled aimlessly up the places, and eddied there, and poured out again
over the pavements. The carriage-ways were packed with every sort of
vehicle, with foot-passengers crowded from the sidewalks, and with
the fragments of the military parade in honor of the President, with
infantry, with straggling cavalrymen, with artillery. All the paths of
the Common and the Garden were filled, and near the Coliseum the throngs
densified on every side into an almost impenetrable mass, that made the
doors of the building difficult to approach and at times inaccessible.
The crowd differed from that of the first day chiefly in size. There
were more country faces and country garbs to be seen, though it was
still, on the whole, a regular-featured and well-dressed crowd, with
still very few but American visages. It seemed to be also a very
frugal-minded crowd, and to spend little upon the refreshments and
amusements provided for it. In these, oddly enough, there was nothing
of the march of mind to be observed; they Were the refreshments and
amusements of a former generation. I think it would not be extravagant
to say that there were tons of pie for sale in a multitude of booths,
with lemonade, soda-water, and ice-cream in proportion; but I doubt if
there was a ton of pie sold, and towards the last the venerable pastry
was quite covered with dust. Neither did people seem to care much for
oranges or bananas or peanuts, or even pop-corn,--five cents a package
and a prize in each package. Many booths stood unlet, and in others the
pulverous ladies and gentlemen, their proprietors, were in the enjoyment
of a leisure which would have been elegant if it had not been forced.
There was one shanty, not otherwise distinguished from the rest,
in which French soups were declared to be for sale; but these alien
pottages seemed to be no more favored than the most poisonous of our
national viands. But perhaps they were not French soups, or perhaps
the vicinage of the shanty was not such as to impress a belief in their
genuineness upon people who like French soups. Let us not be too easily
disheartened by the popular neglect of them. If the daring reformer who
inscribed French soups upon his sign will reappear ten years hence, we
shall all flock to his standard. Slavery is abolished; pie must follow.
Doubtless in the year 1900, the managers of a Jubilee would even let the
refreshment-rooms within their Coliseum to a cook who would offer the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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