Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/141

 spirit. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the City Hall? Was it the knowledge that any one of these bluecoats could, with a mere motion of his hand, consign me to some terrible dungeon within those iron walls—or the thought that in this vast and pitiless pile sat men who held the destiny of my fellow citizens in their hands—or the knowledge that time was flying and I was in imminent peril of missing my train? It was a mystery all insoluble, and I mused in shadowy fancy, caught in a web of ghastly surmise.

At last I raised my head, breaking away from these unanalyzed forebodings. I gazed upward where the last fire of the setting sun tinged the summit with a gruesome glow—O horror more than mortal!—O fearful sight that drove the blood in torrents on my heart—God shield and guard me from the arch-fiend, I shrieked—had William Penn gone Bolshevist? For they had painted the base of his statue—a glaring, bloodlike red!

was thinking, as he crossed the, to him, intolerably interwoven confusion of Market street, that he had never—unless it was once in a dream which he strangely associated in memory with an overplus of antipasto—never consciously, that is, threaded his way through so baffling a predicament of traffic, and it was not until halted, somewhat summarily, though yet kindly, by a