rowd poured down the
broad sidewalks before the handsome, stupid houses that March could
easily pretend he had got among his fellow-plutocrats at last. Still he
expressed his doubts whether this Sunday afternoon parade, which seemed
to be a thing of custom, represented the best form among the young
people of that region; he wished he knew; he blamed himself for becoming
of a fastidious conjecture; he could not deny the fashion and the
richness and the indigeneity of the spectacle; the promenaders looked
New-Yorky; they were the sort of people whom you would know for
New-Yorkers elsewhere,--so well equipped and so perfectly kept at all
points. Their silk hats shone, and their boots; their frocks had
the right distension behind, and their bonnets perfect poise and
distinction.

The Marches talked of these and other facts of their appearance, and
curiously questioned whether this were the best that a great material
civilization could come to; it looked a little dull. The men's faces
were shrewd and alert, and yet they looked dull; the women's were pretty
and knowing, and yet dull. It was, probably, the holiday expression
of the vast, prosperous commercial class, with unlimited money, and no
ideals that money could not realize; fashion and comfort were all that
they desired to compass, and the culture that furnishes showily, that
decorates and that tells; the culture, say, of plays and operas, rather
than books.

Perhaps the observers did the promenaders injustice; they might not have
been as common-minded as they looked. "But," March said, "I understand
now why the poor people don't come up here and live in this clean,
handsome, respectable quarter of the town; they would be bored to death.
On the whole, I think I should prefer Mott Street myself."

In other walks the Marches tried to find some of the streets they had
wandered through the first day of their wedding journey in New York, so
long ago. They could not make sure of them; but once they ran down to
the Battery, and easily made sure of that, though not in its old aspect.
They recalled the hot morning, when they sauntered over the trodden
weed that covered the sickly grass-plots there, and sentimentalized the
sweltering paupers who had crept out of the squalid tenements about for
a breath of air after a sleepless night. Now the paupers were gone, and
where the old mansions that had fallen to their use once stood, there
towered aloft and abroad those heights and m