French Jacobins from
Yankee grain will not run long. Let us go on around the Mall and get
before these foolish folk. Ah, to insult this perfect day of May with
drunkenness! Is there not enough of gladness in the upspring of things
that men must crave the flattery of drink?" He was in one of those moods
when he was not always, as he said, understandable, and when his English
took on queer ways.

Pausing before the gray jail at the corner of Delaware, Sixth Street,
and Walnut, they saw the poor debtors within thrust out between the bars
of the windows long rods with bags at the end to solicit alms. Schmidt
emptied his pockets of shillings, and they went on, the girl in horror
at the blasphemies of those who got no coin. Said Schmidt: "Our friend
Wynne lay there in the war for months. Ask Madam Darthea for the tale,
De Courval. 'T is pretty, and worth the ear of attention. When I rule
the world there will be no prisons. I knew them once too well."

So rare were these glimpses of a life they knew not of that both young
people, surprised, turned to look at him.

"Wert thou in jail, sir?" said the Pearl.

"Did I say so? Life is a jail, my good Margaret; we are all prisoners."
The girl understood, and asked no more. Crossing the Potter's Field, now
Washington Square, they leaped over the brook that ran through it from
the northwest.

"Here below us lie the dead prisoners of your war, Pearl. The jail was
safe, but now they are free. God rest their souls! There's room for
more." Scarcely was there room in that summer of '93. Passing the
Bettering House on Spruce Street Road, and so on and out to the
Schuylkill, they crossed the floating bridge, and from the deep cutting
where Gray's Lane descended to the river, climbed the slope, and sat
down and waited.

Very soon across the river thousands of men gathered and a few women.
The bridge was lined with people and some collected on the bank and in
the lane below them, on the west side of the stream.

Hauterive, the French consul at New York, and Mr. Duponceau and
Alexander Dallas of the Democratic Club, stood near the water on the
west end of the bridge, waiting to welcome Genet. "I like it very well,"
said Schmidt; "but the play will not run long."

"Oh, they are coming!" cried Margaret. This was interesting. She was
curious, excited and with her bonnet off, as De Courval saw,
bright-eyed, eager, and with isles of color mysteriously passing over
her face, like rose clouds