ugh the best shopping
streets as though not only the shops, but the world belonged to them,
and it were no longer the meek, but the proud, that inherit the earth.

If in the throngs on the streets there were often marked contrasts,
Keith was too exhilarated to remark it--at least, at first. If women
with worn faces and garments unduly thin in the frosty air, carrying
large bundles in their pinched hands, hurried by as though hungry, not
only for food, but for time in which to earn food; if sad-eyed men with
hollow cheeks, sunken chests, and threadbare clothes shambled eagerly
along, he failed to note them in his first keen enjoyment of the
pageant. Old clothes meant nothing where he came from; they might be the
badge of perilous enterprise and well-paid industry, and food and fire
were at least common to all.

Keith, indeed, moved about almost in a trance, absorbing and enjoying
the sights. It was Humanity in flood; Life at full tide.

Many a woman and not a few men turned to take a second look at the
tanned, eager face and straight, supple figure, as, with smiling, yet
keen eyes, he stalked along with the free, swinging gait caught on the
mountains, so different from the quick, short steps of the city man.
Beggars, and some who from their look and apparel might not have been
beggars, applied to him so often that he said to one of them, a fairly
well-dressed man with a nose of a slightly red tinge:

"Well, I must have a very benevolent face or a very credulous one!"

"You have," said the man, with brazen frankness, pocketing the
half-dollar given him on his tale of a picked pocket and a remittance
that had gone wrong.

Keith laughed and passed on.

Meantime, Keith was making some discoveries. He did not at first call on
Norman Wentworth. He had a feeling that it might appear as if he were
using his friendship for a commercial purpose. He presented his business
letters. His letters, however, failed to have the weight he had
expected. The persons whom he had met down in New Leeds, during their
brief visits there, were, somehow, very different when met in New York.
Some whom he called on were civil enough to him; but as soon as he
broached his business they froze up. The suggestion that he had
coal-property to sell sent them down to zero. Their eyes would glint
with a shrewd light and their faces harden into ice. One or two told him
plainly that they had no money to embark in "wild-cat schemes."

Mr. Creamer of Cr