Domestic fiction; Short stories; Suburban life -- Fiction
If the throng upon the streets was thinner, it was greater in the
Coliseum than on the second day; and matters had settled there into
regular working order. The limits of individual liberty had been better
ascertained; there was no longer any movement in the aisles, but a
constant passing to and fro, between the pieces, in the promenades. The
house presented, as before, that appearance in which reality forsook
it, and it became merely an amazing picture. The audience supported the
notion of its unreality by having exactly the character of the former
audiences, and impressed you, despite its restlessness and incessant
agitation, with the feeling that it had remained there from the first
day, and would always continue there; and it was only in wandering upon
its borders through the promenades, that you regained possession of
facts concerning it. In no other way was its vastness more observable
than in the perfect indifference of persons one to another. Each found
himself, as it were, in a solitude; and, sequestered in that wilderness
of strangers, each was freed of his bashfulness and trepidation. Young
people lounged at ease upon the floors, about the windows, on the upper
promenades; and in this seclusion I saw such betrayals of tenderness as
melt the heart of the traveller on our desolate railway trains,--Fellows
moving to and fro or standing, careless of other eyes, with their arms
around the waists of their Girls. These were, of course, people who
had only attained a certain grade of civilization, and were not
characteristic of the crowd, or, indeed, worthy of notice except as
expressions of its unconsciousness. I fancied that I saw a number of
their class outside listening to the address of the agent of a patent
liniment, proclaimed to be an unfailing specific for neuralgia and
headache,--if used in the right spirit. “For,” said the orator, “we like
to cure people who treat us and our medicine with respect. Folks say,
'What is there about that man?--some magnetism or electricity.' And the
other day at New Britain, Connecticut, a young man he come up to the
carriage, sneering like, and he tried the cure, and it didn't have the
least effect upon him.” There seemed reason in this, and it produced a
visible sensation in the Fellows and Girls, who grinned sheepishly at
each other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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