Читать книгу The Evacuation of England: The Twist in the Gulf Stream онлайн

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It was evidently expected that the southern gentleman would relieve his feelings, and it was also evident from a few ejaculations hap-hazardly emitted from the concourse, that the majority of those present was in his favor.

Mr. Snowden looked around him reflectively, and a sense of personal dignity forced its way against the almost over-powering impulse to appeal to popular approval, and convinced him that the place and the audience were inopportune for any further discussion. He could not, however, escape the demonstrated force of popular expectancy, and, with a consenting smile, a shrug of his shoulders, and with his hat raised above his head, swinging gently, he called out “Three cheers for Teddy and the Canal.”

In an instant the group seized the invitation, and under the cover, if it may be so violently symbolized, of the cloud of vocality, his enthusiasm evoked, Mr. Snowden, like the fortuitous and directive deities of the epics, vanished.

There remained an unsatisfied group to which more accessions were quickly made, the whole movement evidently animated by some emotion then predominant in the national capital. This group broke up into little knots of talkers, and as the day was closing, no urgency of business engagements and no immediate insistency of domestic duties interfered with the easily elicited Washingtonian tendency to settle, on the public curb, the vexed questions of state, if not to enlighten Providence on the more abstruse functions of His authority.