lved that the present half-day
in New York should be the half-day of her original design.

It was not the most advisable thing, as I have allowed, but it was
inevitable, and it afforded them a spectacle which is by no means
wanting in sublimity, and which is certainly unique,--the spectacle of
that great city on a hot day, defiant of the elements, and prospering
on with every form of labor, and at a terrible cost of life. The man
carrying the hod to the top of the walls that rankly grow and grow as
from his life's blood, will only lay down his load when he feels the
mortal glare of the sun blaze in upon heart and brain; the plethoric
millionaire for whom he toils will plot and plan in his office till he
swoons at the desk; the trembling beast must stagger forward while the
flame-faced tormentor on the box has strength to lash him on; in all
those vast palaces of commerce there are ceaseless sale and purchase,
packing and unpacking, lifting up and laying down, arriving and
departing loads; in thousands of shops is the unspared and unsparing
weariness of selling; in the street, filled by the hurry and suffering
of tens of thousands, is the weariness of buying.

Their afternoon's experience was something that Basil and Isabel could,
when it was past, look upon only as a kind of vision, magnificent at
times, and at other times full of indignity and pain. They seemed to
have dreamed of a long horse-car pilgrimage through that squalid street
by the river-side, where presently they came to a market, opening upon
the view hideous vistas of carnage, and then into a wide avenue, with
processions of cars like their own coming and going up and down the
centre of a foolish and useless breadth, which made even the tall
buildings (rising gauntly up among the older houses of one or two
stories) on either hand look low, and let in the sun to bake the dust
that the hot breaths of wind caught up and gent swirling into the shabby
shops. Here they dreamed of the eternal demolition and construction
of the city, and farther on of vacant lots full of granite boulders,
clambered over by goats. In their dream they had fellow-passengers,
whose sufferings made them odious and whom they were glad to leave
behind when they alighted from the car, and running out of the blaze
of the avenue, quenched themselves in the shade of the cross-street.
A little strip of shadow lay along the row of brown-stone fronts, but
there were intervals where the vacant