The noises on the avenue down which she walked to and from her home were not wearying like those in the shop and the restaurant, for they came and went. The silent moving motors had their horns that gave warning with a silly, childish squeak or with a deep note as hoarse as a frog's. At the corner where she turned east to go home a policeman was stationed, and she enjoyed waiting for the sound of his shrill whistle. But the avenue left behind, the way was less pleasant. Three busy thoroughfares must be crossed without the policeman's aid, the last a dirty boulevard where heavy trains crashed overhead and surface cars clanged swiftly by. She would stand waiting on the sidewalk until a friendly cart from a side street opened up a path of safety that brought her a little breathless to the opposite walk. Now she was almost home--the second door, three flights up, and then restful quiet. Kathleen, her new friend, with whom she had come to live, was away, and with windows closed she would sit in the front room, quite by herself, her hands in her lap, enjoying the silence. Later, dinner over, she would take up a novel, one of the books she had always wanted to read, but could not afford to buy, that here in New York any one might have at the library for the asking. Immersed in _Lorna Doone_, she forgot the pounding machines and the clattering dishes and was very happy; but when the book was put away and she lay down to sleep, through the open window the world of tumult came back again. "Why do men invent so many things that make a noise?" she would ask herself. She had heard city people when they came to the Merryvales' complain bitterly to her of being wakened in the morning by the cock's crowing; but she had not made the cocks, and, moreover, they did not crow all night. Here in her room, however, near the ugly boulevard of the East Side, the man-made cocks never ceased to crow. The trolley cars were the most aggressive; their wheels ground on their axles and jarred upon the rails; they stopped with a loud jolt, and with another jar and jolt were off again. They were always jerking, Hertha felt. Overhead the elevated road vibrated to the heavy cars that moved over its rails day and night. You heard the coming train a long way off. First, a gentle, rumbling noise that you might imagine to be the sea; then a louder and louder roar, and, finally, a crash as the long line of cars rushed past. Sometimes she was sure they would sway too far and fall thundering into the street. And hardly had their sound died away when a second rumbling would be heard and another train come tearing after its fellow, or a third dash by from the opposite side.