The Paternoster Ruby

This was the first wave of the daily townward tide clerks, shop girls, and stenographers, for the most part intent upon bread and butter in futuro. The jostling and crowding was like an old story to me, I went through the ordeal each morning with an indifference and abstraction born of long custom. The time of the year was January, the year itself 1892. A clear, cold air with just enough frost in it to stir sluggish blood induced one to walk briskly. It was still too early in the day for the usual down town crowd, and I proceeded as fast as I wanted to allowing my thoughts to dwell undisturbed on the big news topic of the day which I had just been reading.