Page:The Author of Beltraffio, Pandora, Georgina's Reasons, The Path of Duty, Four Meetings (Boston, James R. Osgood & Co., 1885).djvu/111

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muster resolution. On the wharf people were rushing about amid their trunks, pulling their things together, trying to unite their scattered parcels. They were heated and angry, or else quite bewildered and discouraged. The few that had succeeded in collecting their battered boxes had an air of flushed indifference to the efforts of their neighbors, not even looking at people with whom they had been intimate on the steamer. A detachment of the officers of the customs was in attendance, and energetic passengers were engaged in attempts to drag them toward their luggage or to drag heavy pieces toward them. These functionaries were good-natured and taciturn, except when occasionally they remarked to a passenger whose open trunk stared up at them, imploring, that they were afraid the voyage had been "rather glassy." They had a friendly, leisurely, speculative way of performing their office, and if they perceived a victim's name written on the portmanteau they addressed him by it, in a tone of old acquaintance. Vogelstein found, however, that if they were familiar, they were not indiscreet. He had heard that in America all public functionaries were the same, that there was not a different tenue, as they said in France, for different positions, and he wondered whether at Washington the President and ministers, whom he expected to see, would be like that.

He was diverted from these speculations by the sight of Mr. and Mrs. Day, who were seated side by side upon a trunk, encompassed, apparently, by the