and paper lanterns, and as Harney and Charity turned into the main
street, with its brick and granite business blocks crowding out the old
low-storied shops, and its towering poles strung with innumerable wires
that seemed to tremble and buzz in the heat, they saw the double line of
flags and lanterns tapering away gaily to the park at the other end of
the perspective. The noise and colour of this holiday vision seemed to
transform Nettleton into a metropolis. Charity could not believe
that Springfield or even Boston had anything grander to show, and
she wondered if, at this very moment, Annabel Balch, on the arm of
as brilliant a young man, were threading her way through scenes as
resplendent.

"Where shall we go first?" Harney asked; but as she turned her happy
eyes on him he guessed the answer and said: "We'll take a look round,
shall we?"

The street swarmed with their fellow-travellers, with other
excursionists arriving from other directions, with Nettleton's own
population, and with the mill-hands trooping in from the factories on
the Creston. The shops were closed, but one would scarcely have noticed
it, so numerous were the glass doors swinging open on saloons, on
restaurants, on drug-stores gushing from every soda-water tap, on fruit
and confectionery shops stacked with strawberry-cake, cocoanut drops,
trays of glistening molasses candy, boxes of caramels and chewing-gum,
baskets of sodden strawberries, and dangling branches of bananas.
Outside of some of the doors were trestles with banked-up oranges and
apples, spotted pears and dusty raspberries; and the air reeked with
the smell of fruit and stale coffee, beer and sarsaparilla and fried
potatoes.