Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

POETS, CASUALS, AND NOVELISTS

259

force of animal experts came clamping down the street,
armed( with stout clubs and equipped with capacious bags
of canvas. They beat the bushes, alternately advanced
and retreated as the fugitive cobra-di-capello wriggled
its way from one leafy fastness to another. At last, by
the exercise of technical skill of which I do not possess the
secret, Holden's people bagged the serpent and bore it
back in triumph to enforced companionship with monkeys,
parrots, canary-birds, and goldfish. It was an exciting
hunt; could it have been an advertisement?
A spectacle likewise unique in metropolitan history but
producing a thrill of quite another sort was afforded to my
window by the remarkable land parade of the sailors and
marines from the foreign warships assembled in the North
River for the Columbian celebration of 1892. That was
before the edge had been taken off the strangeness of such
association by the joint march of the Powers from Tientsin to Pekin during the Boxer troubles; long before the
Great War made it an every-day thing to think of international military co-operation. Here for the first time in
the streets of New York were Americans, Britons, Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, Japanese, amicably together
under arms; and as platoon after platoon carrying the
several flags and tramping to the music of the several national airs swung out of Broadway into the plaza and
marched straight toward my window the sensation was
different from anything in experience; it was significant
and unforgetable.
Innumerable processions were among the sights now
spoken of: parades of the National Guard, of the police,
of the firemen; corteges of gaiety and of sorrow; countless

retinues escorting celebrities to the steps of the City Hall
to be welcomed by an oratorical mayor; fantastics in the
earlier years and Thanksgiving Day target parties with
the invarial le Nubian lugging the water-pail at the rear.
And all this but a few hundred feet from the place where