Frederick Dane was on his way towards what he called
his home. His home, alas, was but an indifferent attic
in one of the southern suburbs of Boston. He had been
walking; but he was now standing still, at the well-known
corner of Massachusetts and Columbus Avenues.
As often happens, Frederick Dane had an opportunity
to wait at this corner a quarter of an hour. As he
looked around him on the silent houses, he could not but
observe the polling-booth, which a watchful city
government had placed in the street, a few days before,
in preparation for the election which was to take place
three weeks afterward. Dane is of an inquiring temper,
and seeing that the polling-booth had a door and the door
had a keyhole, he tried in the keyhole a steel key which
he had picked up in Dock Square the day before. Almost
to his surprise, the key governed the lock at once, and
he found himself able to walk in.
He left the door wide open, and the gaslight
streaming in revealed to him the aspect of the
cells
arranged for Australian voting. The rails were all in
their places, and the election might take place the very
next day. It instantly occurred to Dane that he might
save the five cents which otherwise he would have given
to his masters of the street railway, and be the next
morning three miles nearer his work, if he spent the
night in the polling-cabin. He looked around for a
minute or two, and found some large rolls of street
posters, which had been left there by some disappointed
canvasser the year before, and which had accompanied one
cell of the cabin in its travels. Dane is a prompt man,
and, in a minute more, he had locked the door behind him,
had struck a wax taper which he had in his cigar-box, had
rolled the paper roll out on the floor, to serve as a
pillow. In five minutes more, covered with his heavy
coat, he lay on the floor, sleeping as soundly as he had
slept the year before, when he found himself on the lee
side of an iceberg under Peary's command.
This is perhaps unnecessary detail, by way of saying
that this is the beginning of the arrangement which a
city, not very intelligent, will make in the next century
for unsettled people, whose own houses are not agreeable
to them. There exist in Boston at this moment three or
four hundred of the polling-booths, — nice little houses,
enough better than most of the peasantry of most of
Europe ever lived in. They are, alas, generally packed
up in lavender and laid away for ten months
of the
year. But in the twentieth century we shall send them
down to the shores of islands and other places where
people like to spend the summer, and we shall utilize
them, not for the few hours of an election only, but all
the year round. This will not then be called
"Nationalism," it will be called "Democracy;" and that is
a very good name when it is applied to a very good thing.
Dane was an old soldier and an old seaman. He was
not troubled by disagreeable dreams, and in the morning,
when the street-cars began to travel, he was awaked a
little after sunrise, by their clatter on the corner. He
felt well satisfied with the success of his experiment,
and began on a forecast, which the reader shall follow
for a few weeks, which he thought, and thought rightly,
would tend to his own convenience, possibly to that of
his friends.
Dane telegraphed down to the office that he should be
detained an hour that morning, went out to his home of
the day before at Ashmont, paid his landlady her scot,
brought in with him his little possessions in a valise to
the office, and did not appear at his new home until
after nightfall.
He was then able to establish himself on the basis
which proved convenient afterwards, and which it is worth
while to explain to a world which is not too well housed.
The city had provided three or four chairs there, a
stove, and two tables. Dane had little literature, but,
as he was in the literary line himself, he did not
care for this so much; men who write books are not
commonly eager to read books which are worse than their
own. At a nine-cent window of a neighboring tinman's he
was able to buy himself the few little necessities which
he wanted for housekeeping. And not to detain the reader
too long upon merely fleshly arrangements, in the course
of a couple of hours of Tuesday evening and Wednesday
evening, he had fitted up his convenient if not pretty
bower with all that man requires. It was easy to buy a
mince pie or a cream cake, or a bit of boiled ham or
roast chicken, according as payday was near or distant.
One is glad to have a tablecloth. But if one have a
large poster warning people, a year before, that they
should vote the Prohibition ticket, one's conscience is
not wounded if this poster, ink down, takes the place
which a tablecloth would have taken under other
circumstances. If there is not much crockery to use,
there is but little to wash. And, in short, as well
trained a man of the world as Dane had made himself
thoroughly comfortable in his new quarters before the
week was over.
