enter and buy. Even the mourning shops had hidden their gloomy merchandise under the counter for this day only, and displayed nothing but coquettish articles of half-mourning and the subdued purples of departing grief and awakening joy. The toy-shop windows chuckled and grinned with jolly toys. The print-shops had taken down their battle-scenes and death-bed scenes, and, instead of blood and tears, nothing but comedy and sentiment was to be seen. The photographers exhibited their smuggest men and smirkiest women. Nothing could be gayer or brighter or more party-colored than the confectioners’ show-cases, where, under bowers of cornucopias, the tempting wares were arrayed, as if there was somewhere in fairy-land a planet all pink and white and blue and yellow sugar from centre to pole, and this was a geological cabinet of its specimens.
John Brightly ran this amicable gantlet at a great pace, conscious of its love-taps, but proof, as if he were a Princess Pari Banou, to its attempts to arrest him.
Once he felt a little pang as he rattled along, electrified by the keen air. A sharp sunbeam, reflected from a pair of skates, struck him in the eye. He though of his drowned son, drowned last summer, and for an instant fancied him skimming along on the ice, as the father had taught him. But Brightly, though greatly softened by this sorrow, was not a man to let it rankle in his heart and enfeeble him.
