It was after seven o'clock by the time he reached the Junction, and
heavy mutterings of thunder could be heard in the west.

"Does this street go through to the boulevard?" he asked of a man,
pointing with his knobless whip.

The lank person addressed removed his weight from the telegraph pole
that had supported it and sauntered forward. As he did so Donald
recognized the red-headed umpire of the afternoon.

"No, sir, Captain," he said, "it do not. This here is Bean Alley.
These city politicians has got their own way of running streets; they
take a pencil you see and draw a line along the property of folks that
can pay for streets. The balance of us sets in mud puddles." The man
evidently found some difficulty in expressing himself without the
assistance of profanity. There were blanks left between the words,
which he supplied mentally with compressed lips and lifting of shaggy
brows, that served as an effective substitute. His conversation
printed would resemble these grammatical exercises, struggled with an
early youth, in which "a----dog----attacked a----boy with a----stick."

But his suppressed eloquence was lost upon his hearer, for Donald had
become absorbed in a theatrical poster, which represented a
preternaturally slim young lady, poised on a champagne bottle, coyly
surveying an admiring world through the extended fingers of a small
black gloved hand. It was "La Florine," whose charms he had heard
recounted times without number by Mr. Cropsie Decker.

This evening, the poster announced, "La Florine" would for the first
time in any American city, perform her incomparable dance, "The