I have always been peculiarly susceptible to the music of marching feet. I know of no sound in nature or in Wagner that stirs the heart like the footsteps of the crowd on the board platform of the Third Avenue "L" at City Hall every late afternoon. The human tread is always eloquent in chorus, but it is at its best upon a wooden flooring. Stone and asphalt will often degrade the march of a crowd to a shuffle. It needs the living wood to give full dignity to the spirit of human resolution that speaks in a thousand pair of feet simultaneously moving in the same direction; and particularly when the moving mass is not an army, but a crowd advancing without rank or order. I am exceedingly fond of military parades; so fond that I repeatedly find myself standing in front of ladies of medium height who pathetically inquire at frequent intervals what regiment is passing at that moment. But it is not the blare of the brass bands I care for, or the clatter of cavalry, which I find exceedingly stupid, or even the rattle of the heavy guns, but the men on foot. Only when the infantry comes swinging by do I grow wild with the desire to wear a conspicuous uniform and die for my country. Saint-Gaudens's man on horseback in the Shaw memorial is beautiful, but it is the forward-lunging line of negro faces and the line of muskets on shoulder that threaten to bring the tears to my eyes.

This, I suppose, is rank sentimentality; but I cannot help it. Any procession, no matter how humble, puts me into a state of mingled exaltation and tearfulness. It is in part the sound of human footsteps and in part the solemn idea behind them. I am not thinking of stately processions moving up the aisles of churches to the sound of music. I have in mind, rather, a band of, say, a thousand working girls on Labour Day, or of an Italian fraternal organisation heavy with plumes and banners, or even a Tammany political club on its annual outing; wherever the idea of human dependence and human brotherhood is testified to in the mere act of moving along the pavement shoulder to shoulder. Above all things, it is a line of marching children that takes me quite out of myself. I was a visitor not long ago at one of the public schools, and I sat in state on the principal's platform. When the bell rang for dismissal, and the sliding doors were pushed apart so as to form one huge assembly room, and the children began to file out to the sound of the piano, the splendour and the pathos of it overpowered me. I did not know which I wanted to be then, the principal in his magnificent chair of office, or one of those two thousand children keeping step in their march towards freedom.

Pathos? Why pathos in a little army of children marching out in fire drill, or the same children marching in for their morning's Bible reading and singing? I find it difficult to say why. Perhaps it is consciousness of that law which has raised man from the brute, and which I see embodied when we take a thousand children and range them in order and induce them to keep step. Perhaps the pathos is in the recognition of our isolated weakness and our need to make painful progress by getting close together and moving forward in close formation. In any case, the pathos is there. Consider a children's May party, on its way to Central Park. A fife-and-drum corps of three little boys in uniform leads the way. The Queen of the May, all in white, walks with her consort under a canopy of ribbons and flowers, a little stiffly, perhaps, and self-consciously, but not more so than older queens and kings on parade. A long line of boys and girls in many-coloured caps moves between flying detachments of mothers carrying baskets. The confectioner's wagon, laden with its precious commissariat of ice cream and cake, moves leisurely behind; for the confectioner's horse this is evidently a holiday. Is pathos conceivable in so delightful, so smiling, an event? Alas, I have watched May parties go by, and the serious little faces under the red and white caps have given me a heavier case of Weltschmerz than I have ever experienced at a performance of "Tristan und Isolde." It was the fact of those little children advancing in unison; that is the word. If they had trudged or scurried along, pell-mell, I should not have minded. But May parties move forward in procession, and the movement of a compact crowd is, to me, always heavy with pathos.

But no crowd is like the afternoon crowd upon the wooden platform of the "L" station at City Hall. I don't mean to be sentimental when I say that the sound is to me like the march of human civilisation and human history. Outwardly there is little to justify my grandiose comparison. You see only a heaving mass of men and women who are not very well clad. The men are unshaven, the women awry with a day's labour. They move on with that beautiful optimism of an American crowd which has been trained in the belief that there is always plenty of room ahead. There is very little pushing. Occasionally a band of young boys hustle their way through the crowd; but a New York crowd seems always to be mindful of the days when we were all of us boys. It is a reading public. The men carry newspapers whose flaring headlines of red and green give a touch of almost Italian colour. The women carry cloth-bound novels in paper wrappers. But it is not an assemblage of poets or scholars or thinkers, or whatever class it is that is supposed to keep the world moving. It is that most solemn of all things—a city crowd on its way home from the day's work.

The footsteps keep up the tramp, tramp, on the board flooring, while train after train pulls out jammed within and without. The influx from the street allows no vacuum to be formed upon the platform. The patience of the modern man shows wonderfully. The tired workers face the hour's ride that lies between them and home with beautiful self-restraint and courage. And in their weariness and their patience lies the full solemnity of the scene. The morning crowd, even on the same wooden platform at City Hall, is different. The morning crowd is not so firmly knit together. You catch individual and local peculiarities. You feel that there are men and women here from Harlem, and others from Long Island, and others from Westchester and the Bronx. They are still fresh from their separate homes, with their separate atmospheres about them. Some are brisk from the morning's exercise and the cold bath; some are still a bit sleepy from last night's pleasures; some go to the day's task with eager anticipation; some move forward indifferent and resigned. But when these same men and women surge homeward in the evening, they are one in spirit; they are all equally tired. The city and the day's task have seized upon them and passed them through the same set of rollers and pressed out their differences and transformed them into a single mass of weary human material. The city has had its day's work out of them and now sends them home to recruit the new supply of energy that it will demand to-morrow. The unshaven men with their newspapers and the listless women with their paper-covered novels show ascetically tight-drawn faces, as if the day had been passed in prayer and supplication. I need not see those faces; I know they are there from the steady footfalls on the board platform. I overhear a young girl recounting what a perfectly lovely time she had last night, and how she simply couldn't stop dancing; but her foot drags a bit heavily and there sounds in her chatter and her vehemence the ground-tone of weariness.

It is not often that I hear the tramp of the late afternoon crowd upon the wooden platforms at City Hall. I find the sound of the crowd too solemn to be endured every day, and there is no comfort in the crush. I usually take pains to travel at an early hour when there are few people, and one is sure of a seat.