hion might have met each other
in their old haunts, and exchanged stately congratulations upon its
vastly bettered condition, and perhaps puzzled a little over the colossal
lady on Bedloe's Island, with her lifted torch, and still more over the
curving tracks and chalet-stations of the Elevated road. It is an outlook
of unrivalled beauty across the bay, that smokes and flashes with the in
numerable stacks and sails of commerce, to the hills beyond, where the
moving forest of masts halts at the shore, and roots itself in the groves
of the many villaged uplands. The Marches paid the charming prospects a
willing duty, and rejoiced in it as generously as if it had been their
own. Perhaps it was, they decided. He said people owned more things in
common than they were apt to think; and they drew the consolations of
proprietorship from the excellent management of Castle Garden, which they
penetrated for a moment's glimpse of the huge rotunda, where the
immigrants first set foot on our continent. It warmed their hearts, so
easily moved to any cheap sympathy, to see the friendly care the nation
took of these humble guests; they found it even pathetic to hear the
proper authority calling out the names of such as had kin or acquaintance
waiting there to meet them. No one appeared troubled or anxious; the
officials had a conscientious civility; the government seemed to manage
their welcome as well as a private company or corporation could have
done. In fact, it was after the simple strangers had left the government
care that March feared their woes might begin; and he would have liked
the government to follow each of them to his home, wherever he meant to
fix it within our borders. He made note of the looks of the licensed
runners and touters waiting for the immigrants outside the government
premises; he intended to work them up into a dramatic effect in some
sketch, but they remained mere material in his memorandum-book, together
with some quaint old houses on the Sixth Avenue road, which he had
noticed on the way down. On the way up, these were superseded in his
regard by some hip-roof structures on the Ninth Avenue, which he thought
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