THE HOT-AIR HARPS
I
THE excursion barge was waiting at its pier, loaded with a wilted gaiety of white gowns and sticky children, in an atmosphere of perspiring impatience for the arrival of a tugboat that did not come. "I guess they're leavin' us here to melt down," young Barney Maloney said, "so 's the load won't be so heavy to haul." The orchestra of two fiddles and a cornet laid by its instruments and applied itself to its handkerchiefs. "No more ove'tures till the curtain goes up," Barney summed up the situation. "Even the band 's played out."
It was a blazing hot day. And it was the day of the "Dry Dime Dolan Association's Annual Picnic"—a Tammany Irish picnic, chiefly, and therefore one to be enjoyed more in the prospect and the retrospect than it would ever be in the fact. "We 'll think this was fun—the day after to-morrah," Barney said, from his experience.
His mother, his father, his brother Tim, and his brother's "girl," Fanny Menchenoff, were sitting with him in a half circle along the shaded side of the barge, gazing out into the quivering sunlight with expressions that showed them too warm for words. On the pier before them, gangs of sweating laborers unloaded hot
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