e white-aproned butcher among his meats and flies, passes without an
effort to purchase. Hurried and wearied shop-girls tripped by in the
draperies that betrayed their sad necessity to be both fine and shabby;
from a boarding-house door issued briskly one of those cool young New
Yorkers whom no circumstances can oppress: breezy-coated, white-livened,
clean, with a good cigar in the mouth, a light cane caught upon the elbow
of one of the arms holding up the paper from which the morning's news is
snatched, whilst the person sways lightly with the walk; in the
street-cars that slowly tinkled up and down were rows of people with
baskets between their legs and papers before their faces; and all showed
by some peculiarity of air or dress the excess of heat which they had
already borne, and to which they seemed to look forward, and gave by the
scantiness of their number a vivid impression of the uncounted thousands
within doors prolonging, before the day's terror began, the oblivion of
sleep.

As they turned into one of the numerical streets to cross to Broadway,
and found themselves in a yet deeper seclusion, Basil-began to utter in a
musing tone:

"A city against the world's gray Prime,
Lost in some desert, far from Time,
Where noiseless Ages gliding through,
Have only sifted sands and dew,
Yet still a marble head of man
Lying on all the haunted plan;
The passions of the human heart
Beating the marble breast of Art,
Were not more lone to one who first
Upon its giant silence burst,
Than this strange quiet, where the tide
Of life, upheaved on either aide,
Hangs trembling, ready soon to beat
With human waves the Morning Street."

"How lovely!" said Isabel, swiftly catching at her skirt, and deftly
escaping contact with one of a long row of ash-barrels posted
sentinel-like on the edge of the pavement. "Whose is it, Basil?"

"Ah! a poet's," answered her husband, "a man of whom we shall one day any
of us be glad to say that we liked him before he was famous. What a
nebulous sweetness the first lines have, and what a clear, cool light of
day-break in the last!"

"You could have been as good a poet as that, Basil," said the
ever-personal and concretely-speaking Isabel, who could not look at a
mountain without thinking what Basil might have done in that way, if he
had tried.

"O no, I couldn't, dear. It's very d