zed suburb in the way of
domestic architecture. To right, to left, every way I turned, I saw a
cheap, tawdry, slipshod imitation of the real city--or perhaps I should
say, of all that is ugliest and vulgarest, least desirable, and least
calculated to endure, in the troubled face of city life. I was glad to
get away; glad that the gray mist that rolled up from the Hudson River
hid from my sight within its fleecy bosom some details of that vulgar
and pitiful degradation. One place alone I found as I had hoped to find
it. Ex-Mayor Tiemann's house was gone, his conservatory was a crumbling
ruin; the house we decked for Lincoln's death was a filthy tenement with
a tumble-down gallery where the old portico had stood, and I found very
little on my upward pilgrimage that had not experienced some change--for
the worse, as it seemed to me. The very cemetery that belongs to old
Trinity had dandified itself with a wonderful wall and a still more
wonderful bridge to its annex--or appendix, or extension, or whatever
you call it. But just above it is a little enclosure that is called a
park--a place where a few people of modest, old-fashioned, domestic
tastes had built their houses together to join in a common resistance
against the encroachments of the speculator and the nomad house-hunter.
I found this little settlement undisturbed, uninvaded, save by a sort of
gentle decay that did it no ill-service, in my eyes. The pale dust was a
little deeper in the roadways that had once been paved with limestone,
a few more brown autumn leaves had fallen in the corners of the fences,
the clustered wooden houses all looked a little more rustily respectable
in their reserved and sleepy silence--a little bit more, I thought, as
if they sheltered a colony of old maids. Otherwise it looked pretty much
as it did when I first saw it, well nigh thirty years ago.

[Illustration]

To see if there were anything alive in that misty, dusty, faded little
abode of respectability, I rang at the door of one house, and found
some inquiries to make concerning another one that seemed to be
untenanted.

[Illustration]

It was a very pretty young lady who opened the door for me, with such
shining dark eyes and with so bright a red in her cheeks, that you felt
that she could not have been long in that dull, old-time spot, where
life seemed to be all one neutral color. She answered my questions
kindly, and then, with something in her manner which told me that
st