m the same point. He thought he would
particularly like his illustrator to render the Dickensy, cockneyish
quality of the shabby-genteel ballad-seller of whom he stopped to
ask his way to the street where Lindau lived, and whom he instantly
perceived to be, with his stock in trade, the sufficient object of an
entire study by himself. He had his ballads strung singly upon a cord
against the house wall, and held down in piles on the pavement with
stones and blocks of wood. Their control in this way intimated a
volatility which was not perceptible in their sentiment. They were
mostly tragical or doleful: some of them dealt with the wrongs of the
working-man; others appealed to a gay experience of the high seas; but
vastly the greater part to memories and associations of an Irish origin;
some still uttered the poetry of plantation life in the artless accents
of the end--man. Where they trusted themselves, with syntax that yielded
promptly to any exigency of rhythmic art, to the ordinary American
speech, it was to strike directly for the affections, to celebrate
the domestic ties, and, above all, to embalm the memories of angel and
martyr mothers whose dissipated sons deplored their sufferings too
late. March thought this not at all a bad thing in them; he smiled in
patronage of their simple pathos; he paid the tribute of a laugh when
the poet turned, as he sometimes did, from his conception of angel and
martyr motherhood, and portrayed the mother in her more familiar phases
of virtue and duty, with the retributive shingle or slipper in her hand.
He bought a pocketful of this literature, popular in a sense which the
most successful book can never be, and enlisted the ballad vendor so
deeply in the effort to direct him to Lindau's dwelling by the best
way that he neglected another customer, till a sarcasm on his
absent-mindedness stung hint to retort, "I'm a-trying to answer a
gentleman a civil question; that's where the absent-minded comes in."

It seemed for some reason to be a day of leisure with the Chinese
dwellers in Mott Street, which March had been advised to take first.
They stood about the tops of basement stairs, and walked two and two
along the dirty pavement, with their little hands tucked into their
sleeves across their breasts, aloof in immaculate cleanliness from the
filth around them, and scrutinizing the scene with that cynical sneer
of faint surprise to which all aspects of our civilization seem to
move the