past him in her walk; her much-trimmed skirts were voluminous. She never
dropped her eyes upon his work; she only turned them, occasionally, as
she passed, to a mirror suspended above the toilet-table on the other
side of the room. Here she paused a moment, gave a pinch to her waist
with her two hands, or raised these members--they were very plump
and pretty--to the multifold braids of her hair, with a movement half
caressing, half corrective. An attentive observer might have fancied
that during these periods of desultory self-inspection her face forgot
its melancholy; but as soon as she neared the window again it began to
proclaim that she was a very ill-pleased woman. And indeed, in what
met her eyes there was little to be pleased with. The window-panes were
battered by the sleet; the head-stones in the grave-yard beneath seemed
to be holding themselves askance to keep it out of their faces. A tall
iron railing protected them from the street, and on the other side of
the railing an assemblage of Bostonians were trampling about in the
liquid snow. Many of them were looking up and down; they appeared to be
waiting for something. From time to time a strange vehicle drew near to
the place where they stood,--such a vehicle as the lady at the window,
in spite of a considerable acquaintance with human inventions, had
never seen before: a huge, low omnibus, painted in brilliant colors,
and decorated apparently with jangling bells, attached to a species of
groove in the pavement, through which it was dragged, with a great deal
of rumbling, bouncing and scratching, by a couple of remarkably small
horses. When it reached a certain point the people in front of the
grave-yard, of whom much the greater number were women, carrying
satchels and parcels, projected themselves upon it in a compact body--a
movement suggesting the scramble for places in a life-boat at sea--and
were engulfed in its large interior. Then the life-boat--or the
life-car, as the lady at the window of the hotel vaguely designated
it--went bumping and jingling away upon its invisible wheels, with the