asses of many-storied
brick-work for which architecture has yet no proper form and aesthetics
no name. The trees and shrubs, all in their young spring green, blew
briskly over the guarded turf in the south wind that came up over the
water; and in the well-paved alleys the ghosts of eighteenth-century
fashion might have met each other in their old haunts, and exchanged
stately congratulations upon its vastly bettered condition, and perhaps
puzzled a little over the colossal lady on Bedloe's Island, with her
lifted torch, and still more over the curving tracks and chalet-stations
of the Elevated road. It is an outlook of unrivalled beauty across the
bay, that smokes and flashes with the in numerable stacks and sails of
commerce, to the hills beyond, where the moving forest of masts halts at
the shore, and roots itself in the groves of the many villaged uplands.
The Marches paid the charming prospects a willing duty, and rejoiced
in it as generously as if it had been their own. Perhaps it was, they
decided. He said people owned more things in common than they were apt
to think; and they drew the consolations of proprietorship from the
excellent management of Castle Garden, which they penetrated for a
moment's glimpse of the huge rotunda, where the immigrants first set
foot on our continent. It warmed their hearts, so easily moved to any
cheap sympathy, to see the friendly care the nation took of these humble
guests; they found it even pathetic to hear the proper authority calling
out the names of such as had kin or acquaintance waiting there to
meet them. No one appeared troubled or anxious; the officials had a
conscientious civility; the government seemed to manage their welcome
as well as a private company or corporation could have done. In fact, it
was after the simple strangers had left the government care that March
feared their woes might begin; and he would have liked the government to
follow each of them to his home, wherever he meant to fix it within our
borders. He made note of the looks of the licensed runners and touters
waiting for the immigrants outside the government premises; he intended
to work them up into a dramatic effect in some sketch, but they remained
mere material in his memorandum-book, together with some quaint old
houses on the Sixth Avenue road, which he had noticed on the way down.
On the way up, these were superseded in his regard by some hip-roof
structures on the Ninth Avenue, which he though