puffed and steamed, waiting the word to depart. Detached engines
hurried in and out of sheds and roundhouses, seeking their trains,
or bunted the ponderous freight cars into switches; trundling up and
down, clanking, shrieking, their bells filling the air with the
clangour of tocsins. Men in visored caps shouted hoarsely, waving
their arms or red flags; drays, their big dappled horses, feeding in
their nose bags, stood backed up to the open doors of freight cars
and received their loads. A train departed roaring. Before midnight
it would be leagues away boring through the Great Northwest,
carrying Trade--the life blood of nations--into communities of which
Laura had never heard. Another train, reeking with fatigue, the air
brakes screaming, arrived and halted, debouching a flood of
passengers, business men, bringing Trade--a galvanising elixir--from
the very ends and corners of the continent.

Or, again, it was South Water Street--a jam of delivery wagons and
market carts backed to the curbs, leaving only a tortuous path
between the endless files of horses, suggestive of an actual barrack
of cavalry. Provisions, market produce, "garden truck" and fruits,
in an infinite welter of crates and baskets, boxes, and sacks,
crowded the sidewalks. The gutter was choked with an overflow of
refuse cabbage leaves, soft oranges, decaying beet tops. The air was
thick with the heavy smell of vegetation. Food was trodden under
foot, food crammed the stores and warehouses to bursting. Food
mingled with the mud of the highway. The very dray horses were
gorged with an unending nourishment of snatched mouthfuls picked
from backboard, from barrel top, and from the edge of the sidewalk.
The entire locality reeked with the fatness of a hundred thousand
furrows. A land of plenty, the inordinate abundance of the earth
itself emptied itself upon the asphalt and cobbles of the quarter.