were followed by a shouting troop of small boys who overran the
pavements, and some of whom were armed with baseball bats. The big
trolley car was hailed by a dozen dirty little hands.

Even the grumpy passengers were disarmed. The conductor took Mr.
Bentley's bill deprecatingly, as much as to say that the newly organized
Traction Company--just out of the receivers' hands--were the Moloch, not
he, and rang off the fares under protest. And Mr. Bentley, as had been
his custom for years, sat down and took off his hat, and smiled so
benignly at those around him that they immediately began to talk, to him.
It was always irresistible, this desire to talk to Mr. Bentley. If you
had left your office irritated and out of sorts, your nerves worn to an
edge by the uninterrupted heat, you invariably got off at your corner
feeling better. It was Phil Goodrich who had said that Horace Bentley
had only to get on a Tower Street car to turn it into a church. And if
he had chosen to establish that 'dernier cri' of modern civilization
where ladies go who have 'welt-schmerz' without knowing why,
--a sanitarium, he might have gained back again all the money he had lost
in giving his Grantham stock to Eldon Parr.

Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, he could have emptied Dalton Street of
its children. In the first place, there was the irresistible inducement
to any boy to ride several miles on a trolley without having this right
challenged by the irate guardian of the vehicle, without being summarily
requested to alight at twenty-five miles an hour: in the second place,
there was the soda water and sweet biscuit partaken of after the baseball
game in that pavilion, more imposing in one's eyes than the Taj Mahal.
Mr. Bentley would willingly have taken all Dalton Street. He had his own
'welt-schmerz', though he did not go to a sanitarium to cure it; he was
forced to set an age limit of ten, and then establish a high court of