"No, I'll be dogged if I could!" Fulkerson lapsed more and more into the
parlance of his early life in this season of strong excitement.
"I believe if Beaton lags any on the art leg I'll kill him."

"Well, I shouldn't mind your killing Beaton," said March, tranquilly, as
he went out.

He went over to Third Avenue and took the Elevated down to Chatham
Square. He found the variety of people in the car as unfailingly
entertaining as ever. He rather preferred the East Side to the West Side
lines, because they offered more nationalities, conditions, and
characters to his inspection. They draw not only from the up-town
American region, but from all the vast hive of populations swarming
between them and the East River. He had found that, according to the
hour, American husbands going to and from business, and American wives
going to and from shopping, prevailed on the Sixth Avenue road, and that
the most picturesque admixture to these familiar aspects of human nature
were the brilliant eyes and complexions of the American Hebrews, who
otherwise contributed to the effect of well-clad comfort and citizen-
self-satisfaction of the crowd. Now and then he had found himself in a
car mostly filled with Neapolitans from the constructions far up the
line, where he had read how they are worked and fed and housed like
beasts; and listening to the jargon of their unintelligible dialect, he
had occasion for pensive question within himself as to what notion these
poor animals formed of a free republic from their experience of life
under its conditions; and whether they found them practically very
different from those of the immemorial brigandage and enforced complicity
with rapine under which they had been born. But, after all, this was an
infrequent effect, however massive, of travel on the West Side, whereas