t more Dutch-looking.
The perspectives of the cross-streets toward the river were very lively,
with their turmoil of trucks and cars and carts and hacks and foot
passengers, ending in the chimneys and masts of shipping, and final
gleams of dancing water. At a very noisy corner, clangorous with some
sort of ironworking, he made his wife enjoy with him the quiet sarcasm
of an inn that called itself the Home-like Hotel, and he speculated
at fantastic length on the gentle associations of one who should have
passed his youth under its roof.

III.

First and last, the Marches did a good deal of travel on the Elevated
roads, which, he said, gave you such glimpses of material aspects in
the city as some violent invasion of others' lives might afford in human
nature. Once, when the impulse of adventure was very strong in them,
they went quite the length of the West Side lines, and saw the city
pushing its way by irregular advances into the country. Some spaces,
probably held by the owners for that rise in value which the industry
of others providentially gives to the land of the wise and good, it left
vacant comparatively far down the road, and built up others at remoter
points. It was a world of lofty apartment houses beyond the Park,
springing up in isolated blocks, with stretches of invaded rusticity
between, and here and there an old country-seat standing dusty in its
budding vines with the ground before it in rocky upheaval for city
foundations. But wherever it went or wherever it paused, New York gave
its peculiar stamp; and the adventurers were amused to find One
Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street inchoately like Twenty-third Street and
Fourteenth Street in its shops and shoppers. The butchers' shops and
milliners' shops on the avenue might as well have been at Tenth as at
One Hundredth Street.

The adventurers were not often so adventurous. They recognized that
in their willingness to let their fancy range for them, and to let
speculation do the work of inquiry, they were no longer young. Their
point of view was singularly unchanged, and their impressions of New
York remained the same that they had been fifteen years before: huge,
noisy, ugly, kindly, it seemed to them now as it seemed then. The main
difference was that they saw it more now as a life, and then they only
regarded it as a spectacle; and March could not release himself from
a sense of complicity with it, no matter what whimsical, or alien, or
critica