From a Trolley Post.
by Margaret Dodge.
HE man looked discouraged. As he stood on the corner of the avenue, his hands thrust into his overcoat pockets, his slouch hat pulled down over his eyes, he seemed to be posing for an end of the century statue of Resignation. For fifteen minutes he had been facing a purely Bostonese combination of east wind and drizzling rain, while he waited for one of the electric cars billed to pass that corner every five minutes. There was no cab station within a mile, and his train left at the other end of the town in half an hour. Besides, he lived in a city where east winds never blew, and where L trains and cable cars whizzed by with clockwork regularity. Consequently, he possessed few resources for killing time on street corners. After he had read his paper, looked over his memorandum book, and worn a path into the middle of the street by continued expeditions undertaken in hope of sighting the delayed car, he had backed up against the white trolley post, and fixed his lusterless eyes upon the row of brownstone apartment houses that lined the opposite side of the street.
Suddenly a gleam of hope lighted the gloomy eyes of the man at the trolley post. Had the car, after all, taken a "spurt"? Had the wind changed? No; the track was still clear as far as the eye could see; the vane on the nearest church pointed unwaveringly to the east; but the resigned man had made a pleasing discovery,—he had found a companion in misery.
In the third-story side window of an apartment house diagonally opposite, a picturesque, black-eyed youngster stood drumming on the window-pane and scowling out into the brick-paved area on which the window opened, with a disapproval that matched that of the man at the trolley post.
Bud, too, was a stranger within the city's gates, and he, too,
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