He took a step or two and looked back. Young Jacob lingered
on the step, as if he had a further communication to make. He paused.

"I thumped him," said young Jacob, and the narrow door swallowed him up.

Mr. Dolph continued on his walk up Broadway. As he passed the upper end
of the Common he looked with interest at the piles of red sandstone
among the piles of white marble, where they were building the new City
Hall. The Council had ordered that the rear or northward end of the
edifice should be constructed of red stone; because red stone was cheap,
and none but a few suburbans would ever look down on it from above
Chambers Street. Mr. Dolph shook his head. He thought he knew better. He
had watched the growth of trade; he knew the room for further growth; he
had noticed the long converging lines of river-front, with their
unbounded accommodation for wharves and slips. He believed that the day
would come--and his own boy might see it--when the business of the city
would crowd the dwelling-houses from the river side, east and west, as
far, maybe, as Chambers Street. He had no doubt that the boy might find
himself, forty years from then, in a populous and genteel neighborhood.
Perhaps he foresaw too much; but he had a jealous yearning for a house
that should be a home for him, and for his child, and for his
grandchildren. He wanted a place where his wife might have a garden; a
place which the boy would grow up to love and cherish, where the boy
might bring a wife some day. And even if it were a little out of
town--why, his wife did not want a rout every night; and it was likely
his old friends would come out and see him once in a while, and smoke a
pipe in his garden and eat a dish of strawberries, perhaps.

As he thought it all over for the hundredth time, weighing for and
against in his gentle and deliberative mind, he strolled far out of
town. There was a house here and there on the road--a house with a trim,
stiff little garden, full of pink and white and blue flowers in orderly,
clam-shell-bordered beds. But it was certainly, he had to admit, as he
looked about him, very _countrified_ indeed. It seemed that the city
must lose itself if it wandered up here among these rolling meadows and
wooded hills. Yet even up here, half way to Greenwich Village, there
were little outposts of the town--clumps of neighborly houses, mostly of
the poorer class, huddling together to form small nuclei for sporadic
growth. There was on