dying in it, were now in a manner dead with it, so that their
ghosts were glad to get back to town, where the ghosts of thousands and
hundreds of thousands of others were hustling in the streets and the
trolleys and subways and elevateds, and shops and factories and offices,
and making believe to be much more alive than they were in the country.
Yet the town, the haunt of those harassed and hurried spectres, who are
not without their illusory hilarity, their phantasmal happiness, has a
charm which we of the Easy Chair always feel, on first returning to it
in the autumn, and which the representative of the family we are
imagining finds rather an impassioned pleasure in. He came on to New
York, while the others lingered in a dim Bostonian limbo, and he amused
himself very well, in a shadowy sort, looking at those other shades who
had arrived in like sort, or different, and were there together with him
in those fine days just preceding the election; after which the season
broke in tears again, and the autumn advanced another step toward
winter.

There is no moment of the New York year which is more characteristic of
it than that mid-autumnal moment, which the summer and the winter are
equally far from. Mid-May is very well, and the weather then is perfect,
but that is a moment pierced with the unrest of going or getting ready
to go away. The call of the eld in Europe, or the call of the wild in
Newport, has already depopulated our streets of what is richest and
naturally best in our city life; the shops, indeed, show a fevered
activity in the near-richest and near-best who are providing for their
summer wants at mountain or sea-shore; but the theatres are closing like
fading flowers, and shedding their chorus-girls on every outward breeze;
the tables d'hote express a relaxed enterprise in the nonchalance of the
management and service; the hotels yawn wearily from their hollow rooms;
the greengroceries try to mask the barrenness of their windows in a show
of tropic or semi-tropic fruits; the provision-men merely disgust with
their retarded displays of butcher's meats and poultry.

[Illustration: BROADWAY AT NIGHT]

But with what a difference the mid-autumn of the town welcomes its
returners! Ghosts, we have called them, mainly to humor a figure we
began with, but they are ghosts rather in the meaning of _revenants_,
which is a good meaning enough. They must be a very aged or very stupid
sort of _revenants_ if their paling