Alec tapped on the front window, and Colin opened it. “I suppose we should do this,” Alec said, sounding less sure of himself now. He’d talked bravely about facing down the British troops, but the slum children were something different entirely.

I had pictured proud, sad-eyed people dressed in meticulously maintained rags who would weep with gratitude for our generosity. These people’s rags were filthy and unkempt. Their eyes were neither sad nor proud. A few looked sullen, others blank. Many of the adults—and some of the children—appeared to be intoxicated, even at that hour on a Sunday morning. They probably didn’t know or care about the struggles between the Mechanics and the British because they’d come out the same, either way. They were no more likely to use machinery than magic.

Colin straightened his hat, took a deep breath, and stood in the doorway. “All children are invited to join us on a magnificent excursion, at no cost to you!” he shouted. “Take a ride on our steam-driven omnibus for a picnic on the Battery, where you’ll see amazing machines in action!”

Somebody threw a rock at the engine, narrowly missing the driver but hitting the machine with an echoing clang. “Hey!” Alec shouted, then he pulled a lever, sending a burst of steam billowing into the air. That drove the troublemakers back.

A few children stepped up, and some of the parents gave their children a hard shove toward the buses, but most still hung back. Other parents grabbed their children and held them close or pushed them into doorways. “We’ll return them,” Colin blurted, sounding affronted. A few more children edged forward, but we still didn’t have enough to fill both buses. “We have sweets!” Colin shouted in desperation, and a mob of children materialized as if from thin air to rush, shouting, toward us.

Colin instinctively jumped away from the door. “We appear to be under attack,” he said wryly. Putting on his conductor persona, he said with a welcoming grin, “Right this way, ladies and gentlemen, one at a time.” But the children, who had likely never ridden any conveyance with a conductor, nearly trampled him in their eagerness to find the sweets.

When we had everyone on board, there were so many children that the smaller ones had to sit in the bigger ones’ laps, and there were even a couple of older boys riding on the engine. Finally, with one last great blast of the whistle, we were off. We’d barely gone three blocks before the children were out of their seats, running up and down the aisle. The bus threatened to tip over when a particularly interesting sight on one side brought all of them over to see it.