ws, he rules a hundred helpless millionaires!"

Like all daughters of a free country, Isabel knew nothing about
politics, and she felt that she was getting into deep water; she
answered buoyantly, but she was glad to make her weariness the occasion
of hailing a stage, and changing the conversation. The farther down town
they went the busier the street grew; and about the Astor House, where
they alighted, there was already a bustle that nothing but a fire could
have created at the same hour in Boston. A little farther on the steeple
of Trinity rose high into the scorching sunlight, while below, in the
shadow that was darker than it was cool, slumbered the old graves among
their flowers.

"How still they lie!" mused the happy wife, peering through the iron
fence in passing.

"Yes, their wedding-journeys are ended, poor things!" said Basil; and
through both their minds flashed the wonder if they should ever come to
something like that; but it appeared so impossible that they both smiled
at the absurdity.

"It's too early yet for Leonard," continued Basil; "what a pity the
church-yard is locked up. We could spend the time so delightfully in
it. But, never mind; let us go down to the Battery,--it 's not a
very pleasant place, but it's near, and it's historical, and it's
open,--where these drowsy friends of ours used to take the air when
they were in the fashion, and had some occasion for the element in its
freshness. You can imagine--it's cheap--how they used to see Mr. Burr
and Mr. Hamilton down there."

All places that fashion has once loved and abandoned are very
melancholy; but of all such places, I think the Battery is the most
forlorn. Are there some sickly locust-trees there that cast a tremulous
and decrepit shade upon the mangy grass-plots? I believe so, but I do
not make sure; I am certain only of the mangy grass-plots, or rather the
spaces between the paths, thinly overgrown with some kind of refuse and
opprobrious weed, a stunted and pauper vegetation proper solely to the
New York Battery. At that hour of the summer morning when our friends,
with the aimlessness of strangers who are waiting to do something else,
saw the ancient promenade, a few scant and hungry-eyed little boys and
girls were wandering over this weedy growth, not playing, but moving
listlessly to and fro, fantastic in the wild inaptness of their
costumes. One of these little creatures wore, with an odd involuntary
jauntiness, the cast-off b