; each swept down her own door
steps and the pavement in front of her own house, and then knocked her
broom on the curbstone and vanished into the house, on which the hand of
change had already fallen. It was no longer a street solely devoted to
the domestic gods, but had been invaded at more than one point by the
bustling deities of business in such streets the irregular, inspired
doctors and doctresses come first with inordinate door-plates, then
a milliner filling the parlor window with new bonnets; here even a
publisher had hung his sign beside a door, through which the feet of
young ladies used to trip, and the feet of little children to patter.
Here and there stood groups of dwellings unmolested as yet outwardly;
but even these had a certain careworn and guilty air, as if they knew
themselves to be cheapish boarding-houses or furnished lodgings for
gentlemen, and were trying to hide it. To these belonged the frowzy
serving-women; to these the rows of ash-barrels, in which the decrepit
children and mothers of the streets were clawing for bits of coal.

By the time Basil and Isabel reached Broadway there were already some
omnibuses beginning their long day's travel up and down the handsome,
tiresome length of that avenue; but for the most part it was empty.
There was, of course, a hurry of foot-passengers upon the sidewalks, but
these were sparse and uncharacteristic, for New York proper was still
fast asleep. The waiter at the restaurant into which our friends stepped
was so well aware of this, and so perfectly assured they were not of the
city, that he could not forbear a little patronage of them, which
they did not resent. He brought Basil what he had ordered in barbaric
abundance, and charged for it with barbaric splendor. It is all but
impossible not to wish to stand well with your waiter: I have myself
been often treated with conspicuous rudeness by the tribe, yet I have
never been able to withhold the 'douceur' that marked me for a gentleman
in their eyes, and entitled me to their dishonorable esteem. Basil was
not superior to this folly, and left the waster with the conviction
that, if he was not a New Yorker, he was a high-bred man of the world at
any rate.

Vexed by a sense of his own pitifulness, this man of the world continued
his pilgrimage down Broadway, which even in that desert state was full
of a certain interest. Troops of laborers straggled along the pavements,
each with his dinner-pail in hand;