Then, as Laurence hastily retreated, the man shook his head, and added to his grown listeners: “Ain’t that jest what I says? It gits everybody to talkin’—even a lot of awnry dressed-up little boys! It ain’t _right_, and Chollie and Mabel ought to have some consideration. Other folks has got to live as well as them! Why, I tell you——” He stopped, and with a woeful exclamation pointed to the street-corner south of them. “Look there! It’s that blame sister-in-law o’ George’s. I reckon _she_ must of run out through the alley. Now they _have_ done it!” His allusion was to a most blonde young woman, whose toilet, evidently of the hastiest, had called upon one or two garments for the street as an emergency supplement to others eloquent of the intimate boudoir. She came hurrying, her blue crocheted slippers scurrying in and out of variegated draperies; and all the while she talked incessantly, and with agitation, to a patrolman in uniform who hastened beside her. Naturally, they brought behind them an almost magically increasing throng of citizens, aliens and minors. They hurried to the once green doors; the patrolman swung these open, and he and the blonde young woman went in. So did the crowd, thus headed and protected by the law’s very symbol; and Laurence went with them. Carried along, jostled and stepped upon, he could see nothing; and inside the solidly filled room he found himself jammed against a woman who surged in front of him. She was a fat woman, and tall, with a great, bulbous, black cotton cloth back; and just behind Laurence there pressed a short and muscular man who never for an instant relaxed the most passionate efforts to see over the big woman. He stood on tiptoe, stretching himself and pushing hard down on Laurence’s shoulders; and he constantly shoved forward, inclosing Laurence’s head between himself and the big woman’s waist, so that Laurence found breathing difficult and uncomfortable. The black cotton cloth, against which his nose was pushed out of shape, smelled as if it had been in the rain—at least that was the impression obtained by means of his left nostril, which remained partially unobstructed; and he did not like it. In a somewhat dazed and hazy way he had expected to see Daisy and Elsie and a blind tiger, but naturally, under these circumstances, no such expectation could be realized. Nor did he hear anything said about either the tiger or the little girls; the room was a chaos of voices, though bits of shrill protestation, and gruffer interruptions from the central group, detached themselves. “I _never_!” cried the shrillest voice. “I never even _pointed_ it at _any_ of ’em! So help me——”