or, who was passing all his
pieces after carelessly looking into one: the official who received the
declarations on board had noted a Grand Army button like his own in the
major's lapel, and had marked his fellow-veteran's paper with the mystic
sign which procures for the bearer the honor of being promptly treated
as a smuggler, while the less favored have to wait longer for this
indignity at the hands of their government. When March's own inspector
came he was as civil and lenient as our hateful law allows; when he had
finished March tried to put a bank-note in his hand, and was brought to
a just shame by his refusal of it. The bed-room steward keeping guard
over the baggage helped put-it together after the search, and protested
that March had feed him so handsomely that he would stay there with it
as long as they wished. This partly restored March's self-respect, and
he could share in General Triscoe's indignation with the Treasury ruling
which obliged him to pay duty on his own purchases in excess of the
hundred-dollar limit, though his daughter had brought nothing, and they
jointly came far within the limit for two.

He found that the Triscoes were going to a quiet old hotel on the way
to Stuyvesant Square, quite in his own neighborhood, and he quickly
arranged for all the ladies and the general to drive together while he
was to follow with his son on foot and by car. They got away from
the scene of the customs' havoc while the steamer shed, with its vast
darkness dimly lit by its many lamps, still showed like a battle-field
where the inspectors groped among the scattered baggage like details
from the victorious army searching for the wounded. His son clapped him
on the shoulder when he suggested this notion, and said he was the
same old father; and they got home as gayly together as the dispiriting
influences of the New York ugliness would permit. It was still in those
good and decent times, now so remote, when the city got something for
the money paid out to keep its streets clean, and those they passed
through were not foul but merely mean.

The ignoble effect culminated when they came into Broadway, and found
its sidewalks, at an hour when those of any European metropolis would
have been brilliant with life, as unpeopled as those of a minor country
town, while long processions of cable-cars carted heaps of men and women
up and down the thoroughfare amidst the deformities of the architecture.

The next morning