A small crowd was collected in front of the Hotel Mazarin, and its proportions were gradually being swelled by passing Saturday loungers. Walter Sedger's drag, drawn up in front of the hotel to receive his party for the races, was the attraction which drew together this inquisitive throng, and in spite of the expression of superior indifference assumed by most of the men and boys composing the crowd, it was easy to see that the red-wheeled coach, with its smart team of browns, was an object of more than passing interest. A park policeman was exchanging a word or two in a knowing manner with the stolid Briton in boots and breeches at the leaders' heads, and near him a slouch-hatted veteran, wearing a Grand Army badge, was talking condescendingly with an ice-man. A large cake of ice, which had been carried thus far on its way to the hotel bar, was slowly melting in the sun, and little streams of water flowed from it and trickled into the gutter; but the veteran and the ice-man still gazed at the shining panels of the drag, and eyed the "cattle" with the air of connoisseurs, while a butcher's boy with his white apron and basket of meat, and a German carpenter with his kit of tools, stood there stolidly, intent upon remaining until the show was over. A diminutive Italian boot-black, still attired in the rags of his native Naples, had crowded to the curb and was standing in front of two Norwegian sailors; just behind them was a party of Bohemian laborers, and a peddler from sunny Sicily touched elbows with a mortar-covered mason from Erin's shores, while some cadaverous clerks from the State Street shops, radiant in the ready-made attire of assumed gentility, were there, helping to swell this crowd of perhaps a hundred loungers. They were all citizen of the great Republic, and though few could speak intelligently the language of their adopted home, probably most of them, in their hearts, resented the appearance on the Chicago streets of this English coach as something unAmerican, for which "them doods" on the Avenue were responsible.
The hands of the hotel clock indicated that the hour was nearing two. The thin-faced veteran in the slouch hat plunged his hands deeper into his trousers' pockets, and, turning his head to a critical angle, said patronizingly to the ice-man: "Them's the things they calls 'tally-ho's.'" The ice-man rolled his shirt-sleeves a little higher above his elbows, folded his brawny arms and replied, in the accent of the Teuton, "I dink dot vas it."