too. He found the major already in the hands of an
inspector, who was passing all his pieces after carelessly looking into
one: the official who received the declarations on board had noted a
Grand Army button like his own in the major's lapel, and had marked his
fellow-veteran's paper with the mystic sign which procures for the bearer
the honor of being promptly treated as a smuggler, while the less favored
have to wait longer for this indignity at the hands of their government.
When March's own inspector came he was as civil and lenient as our
hateful law allows; when he had finished March tried to put a bank-note
in his hand, and was brought to a just shame by his refusal of it. The
bed-room steward keeping guard over the baggage helped put-it together
after the search, and protested that March had feed him so handsomely
that he would stay there with it as long as they wished. This partly
restored March's self-respect, and he could share in General Triscoe's
indignation with the Treasury ruling which obliged him to pay duty on his
own purchases in excess of the hundred-dollar limit, though his daughter
had brought nothing, and they jointly came far within the limit for two.

He found that the Triscoes were going to a quiet old hotel on the way to
Stuyvesant Square, quite in his own neighborhood, and he quickly arranged
for all the ladies and the general to drive together while he was to
follow with his son on foot and by car. They got away from the scene of
the customs' havoc while the steamer shed, with its vast darkness dimly
lit by its many lamps, still showed like a battle-field where the
inspectors groped among the scattered baggage like details from the
victorious army searching for the wounded. His son clapped him on the
shoulder when he suggested this notion, and said he was the same old
father; and they got home as gayly together as the dispiriting influences
of the New York ugliness would permit. It was still in those good and
decent times, now so remote, when the city got something for the money
paid out to keep its streets clean, and those they passed through were
not foul but merely mean.

The ignoble effect culminated when they came into Broadway, and found its
sidewalks, at an hour when those of any European metropolis would have
been brilliant with life, as unpeopled as those of a minor country town,
while long processions of cable-cars carted heaps of men and women up and
down the thoroughfare amidst