Chapter VI: Part 6

"Ime going to quit. Ime tired, and I aint never felt so old as I do
since I had that fall an hour ago. It knocked more out of me than
wind. I was thinking Pat M'Can here could get me a job, but he cant
for fear of the civil service. So its time I quit for good and all.
Ime going to put up my watch and get a gun. Then Ime going up to
Jacks. Mary cant refuse me a bite. Its little enough to give me Ime
thinking and its the last time Ile ask it too. The kids are going
out to a party--a sunday school party it is. Ile see them all once
more, and Ile say good-by to them. After supper when the kids are
gone I will get out the pistol and I will put the bullet where it
will do most good. May be Jack will be sorry when its too late may
be Mary will too. I dont know. If they had treated me white first
off, I woodent need to buy no gun now.

"Good-by now, Terry, and God Bless you all. Its time I was going
along to Marys if I want to see the kids again.

"Your old friend

"DAN MALONE."

When he had made an end of the letter he had a pull or two at his pipe, and then he finished his beer. He took up what he had written and read it over carefully to see if he had said all that needed to be said. Satisfied, he folded it and tucked it inside the envelope. After four or five whiffs more his pipe was smoked out. He emptied it on the table with a sharp rap, and methodically put it back in the breast-pocket of his coat.

Then he raised himself to his feet slowly and carefully, not knowing just what bruised muscle he might chance to stretch by an inadvertent gesture. He shuffled across to the bar and paid for his drinks, and asked the barkeeper if there was a stamp to be had. As it happened, Tom was able to give him one, which he stuck on the corner of the envelope.

"Say, Mr. Malone," asked the barkeeper, "ye don't want no tickets for the Lady Dazzlers' Coterie Mask and Civic Ball, to-night, do ye? It's goin' to be the most high-toned blow-out they ever had."

"I'm not goin' to balls any more," Malone answered, "I'm too old now."

Buttoning his thin overcoat tightly across the chest, he held out his hand to Tom, to the barkeeper's great surprise.

"Good-bye," he said, "Good-bye. Maybe I won't see you again, Tom."

"Good-bye, Mr. Malone," Tom answered. "But ye'll be better in the mornin,' I'm thinkin'."

"Yes," the elder man repeated, "I'll be better in the mornin'. Yes; I'm goin' to make sure of that, to-night."

When he opened the outer door of the saloon the damp moisture suddenly filled his lungs and he choked, but he dared not cough, as the strained muscles of his side warned him.

Two doors above the saloon was a pawnbroker's office, with the three golden balls hanging over the door, and with the unredeemed pledges offered for sale in the broad window. Into this store Malone made his way, glad to get out of the dank air, if only for a moment.

In perhaps five minutes he came forth holding in his hand the envelope addressed to the Honorable Terence O'Donnell. He paused on the threshold of the pawnshop and, by the light of the gas-jets in its window, he put the pawn-ticket into the letter and then closed it. In the large right-hand pocket of his thin overcoat there was something that had not been there when he entered the pawnbroker's--something irregular in shape; it was the revolver he had bought with the money advanced on his watch.

He turned down the avenue again, for there was a letter-box on the lamp-post at the corner occupied by M'Cann's saloon. The store between the pawnbroker's and the barroom was an undertaker's; and Malone, walking slowly past, saw in the window a little coffin, lined with white satin.

"It'll take a bigger one than that for me," he said. "To-night's Friday--they'll be havin' the funeral on Sunday."

At the corner he dropped the letter into the box on the lamp-post, just as there came a weird shriek from an impatient tug in the river far behind him. While he was waiting for a cable-car a lame newsboy limped up to him and proffered the evening papers with a beseeching look. Malone felt in his pocket and found only two coins, a nickel and a quarter. He gave the quarter to the newsboy. Then he lifted himself painfully on the rear platform of a cable-car, and handed the nickel to the impatient conductor. The car clanged forward again; and soon the halo about its colored lamp faded away in the murky distance.

(1895.)

A GLIMPSE OF THE UNDER WORLD

It was a little dinner indeed, a dinner for eight only; and it was given one evening in March, in a spacious and handsome dwelling in Madison Avenue, high up on the slope of Murray Hill. The wide dining-room was at the rear of the house, and it had a broad butler's-pantry extending into the yard behind. The large kitchen was under the dining-room; and under the butler's-pantry was a room of the same size which the servants used as a parlor. In one corner of this sitting-room for the domestics was the dumb-waiter which connected with the pantry above, and in another corner was a spiral staircase which allowed the butler to descend swiftly to the kitchen in case of emergency. There was a table near the window of this servants' parlor, with a battered student-lamp on it; and around the table were grouped three or four chairs.

A whistle sounded gently in the kitchen, and the Swedish cook walked leisurely to the speaking-tube and whistled back. Then she listened, and heard the butler say, "They're all here now; I've got the oysters on the table, and I'm a-goin' in now to announce dinner to the madam. So you get that soup ready--do you hear?"

The cook did not deign to make any direct reply, but, as she left the speaking-tube and went back to the range, she said, loud enough to be heard by the servants in the sitting-room adjoining, "As though I did not know anything! I will never have another place if a black man is butler."

In the room under the pantry a sharp, wiry boy was grinning. "They're allus havin' spats, ain't they, them two? If I was Cato I wouldn't let no Dutch cook sass me, even if I was a nigger, would you?"

"Who is this young cub, when he's at 'ome?" asked the clean-shaven, trim-looking young British valet.

"He's Tim," answered the Irish laundress.

"I'm Tim," said the boy, indignantly, "that's who I am, and I'm as good as you are, too, for all you belong to a lord! And you needn't put on no frills with me, neither, for when I'm a year or two older I can lick ye!--see?"

"Don't ye mind the boy, Mr. Parsons," the Irish girl intervened. "He's no call here at all, at all. He'd run of an errand belike in the mornin' and does be sthrivin' to make himself useful. That's why they kept him here the night."

"I've got just as good a right here as he has," the boy declared, "and he doesn't come here after you either, Maggie--you're not his steady. It's that French Elise he is sparkin'."

"An' greatly I care if he is! Sparkin', in truth! Bad cess to yer impidence," said the pleasant-faced laundress, drawing herself up. "A man, is it? It's lashins and lavins of men I could have if I'd a mind."

Fortunately the cook called Tim at this juncture and gave him a chore to do; and so left the Irish girl and the young Englishman alone.

The valet had been standing until then with his hat and cane in his hand and his overcoat across his arm. Now he laid these things on the table and took his seat by the side of the comely Irishwoman.

"Mam'zelle," he began, "is a French girl, of course, and I never could abide a foreign lingo. Now it's a pleasure for me to hear you talk, Miss Maggie."

"Ah, do be aisy, now, Mr. Parsons," she returned, coquettishly.

"It's gospel truth," he rejoined. "I enjoy talkin' to you. You keep your eyes wide open and can always tell me what's goin' on!"

"Troth, can I?" replied the laundress. "I know which ind of the egg the chicken'll be after chippin'--every time."

"Then tell me who's dinin' 'ere to-night," the valet asked.

Before she could answer the whistle sounded faintly again, and the cook immediately brought in the green-turtle soup in the handsome silver tureen, and sent it up on the dumb-waiter. Then she returned at once to the kitchen.

"It's not a big dinner," the Irishwoman explained. "There's only eight of them. There's us three, isn't there?--Mr. and Mrs. Van Allen and Miss Ethel. Then there's your lord--and I'll go bail it's Miss Ethel he's after now? He'll be the lucky man if he gets her, too; it's a sweet angel she is."

"She won't be so unlucky to 'ave 'im neither," the Englishman returned, "mark that! She'll be Lady Stanyhurst, won't she? And my lord is a fine figure of a man, too!"

"Sure it isn't under the skin of any man that ever stepped to be worthy the likes of Miss Ethel!" said Maggie, looking at Parsons out of the corner of her eye.

"There ain't any girl in the States 'ere that wouldn't be proud to 'ave my lord," the valet retorted. "There's lots of 'em settin' their caps for 'im now. He can 'ave 'is pick, 'e can."

"The sorra cap Miss Ethel'll set for him or any man," the laundress declared. "The boy that wants her'll have to court her."

"I 'ave reason to believe that the marriage is arranged," Parsons asserted. "I 'ope--" then he paused, and with an effort he went on again: "I hope that 'er father is a warm man? He's good to give the girl a plum at least, I 'ope? We couldn't throw ourselves away on a girl who 'adn't a plum, you know."

"An' what might a plum be?" asked Maggie.

"A plum," the young Englishman explained, "is a 'undred thousand pounds--'alf a million dollars, isn't it?"

"It's a whole million Mr. Van Allen can give Miss Ethel," Maggie said, "and more, too, if he wanted to. By the same token, they do be after tellin' me he has one big building down-town somewhere--I don't know--where the tenants pay him a hundred thousand dollars a year; an' they pay it, too, regular, an' nivver an eviction from one year's end to the other."

The whistle shrilled out again, and the cook made haste to place on the dumb-waiter the dish containing the fillets of sea-bass.

A few minutes later Mlle. Elise, the French maid of Miss Van Allen, entered the servants' sitting-room, and was cordially greeted by Mr. Parsons. It appeared that the Frenchwoman had been detained in Mrs. Van Allen's room relieving the guests of their wraps.

"Zat ole maid, Miss Marlenspuyk--what devil of name it is--" said Elise, "she is a true grande dame; but that Mistress Playfair--oh! I cannot suffer her! She is--how you say--made up? stuck up?"

"It's both stuck up and med up she is," the Irish laundress declared. "She's that painted her own mother wouldn't know her. An' as for stuck up, her manners is that bad there isn't none of her girls will stay in her house the second month; they gets their bit of money and they goes. Sure my brother is coachman there, and it's seven years he's had the place."

"How can he rest zere," asked the French maid, "if she is so stuck up?"

"Ah, my brother is a steady lad, and they get on very well," Maggie returned. "He knows his place, and she knows her place, too. She never says nothin' to him, and he never says nothin' to her. An' it's a good job he has, an' he don't mean to let go of it. He keeps a still tongue in his head, Danny does; but there's months when, with his wages and with his board-wages and with what he makes on the feed, the place is worth more than a hundred dollars to him."

"It's as much as a man's place is worth sometimes to accept the commission you're entitled to," the valet remarked.

"Ah, but Danny's the boy!" the laundress responded, shrewdly. "It's too much he knows about Mrs. Playfair for him to lose the job; trust him for that! As long as he wants that place he can have it an' welcome; she won't never say nothin' to him."

"Is she a widow or is she divorced, zis Mistress Playfair?" asked the French maid.

"She's the wan an' the other," said the laundress, with a laugh. "Mr. Playfair, he took and died a week after the trial, barrin' a day."

"What's this I 'ear about your Mr. Van Allen and Mrs. Playfair?" Parsons inquired.

"Is there anything between them, do you think?"

The whistle was heard again, and the cook passed before them with a saddle of mutton; and for the moment the valet's question remained unanswered.

"Who is it they have to dinner, after all?" the laundress inquired. "There's our three and your lord and Miss Marlenspuyk and Mrs. Playfair--but that's sure only six. There was to be eight all out, I'm thinkin'. It's two more men they must have."

"I heard his lordship say that he expected to meet the Lord Bishop of Tuxedo," the Englishman remarked.

"And madame say zat ze judge would be here," said the French maid.

"Judge Gillespie?" asked the valet, with a certain interest.

"Yes," the Frenchwoman answered, "the Judge Gillespie. What does that make to you zat you jump like zat?"

"Oh, nothin', nothin' at all," returned Parsons, settling himself back in his chair with a snigger.

"Out with it!" cried the Irish girl. "Don't be grinnin' all night there like a stuck pig! Out with it--I see it's on the end of your tongue."

"But yes--but yes," urged the maid, "what is it you have to laugh?"

"Really," the valet began, "I don't know that I ought to say anything 'ere in this 'ouse, you know--house, I mean. But I 'ave been told that this 'ere Judge Gillespie is a very great friend of Mrs. Van Allen's. Mind, I don't say there's anything wrong in it, you know. I only tell you what I 'ave 'eard tell myself in society 'ere and there. You see this ain't the only 'ouse I visit in New York, not by a long shot it ain't. And knowin' I visit 'ere, why, naturally, you see, my other friends tell me the news, you know--the news about the goin's on 'ere, you know."

The Irish laundress and the French maid looked at each other for a moment, and then both laughed.

"It's not outside they get the first news, is it?" the laundress inquired.

Apparently the maid was also going to make a remark, but she changed her mind as the cook again came to the dumb-waiter with the dish of little silver saucepans containing terrapin.

The valet was somewhat puzzled by the failure of his two attempts to open the family cupboard of the host and hostess for an inspection of the skeletons it might contain.

"I don't know how she has them seated at the table," Maggie declared.

"Of course, his lordship took her in," the Englishman declared. "A earl 'as precedence of a judge or a bishop."

"I'd like to have a look at that lordship of yours," the Irishwoman said, as she rose to her feet. "I'll slip up the stairs there, and maybe I can get a glimpse of 'em through the door an' no one a ha'p'orth the wiser. Is it a young man your lordship is?"

"His lordship is a young man yet," the valet replied.

"I know what that means," the laundress answered. "If he's a young man yet, I'll go bail he hasn't a hair between him an' heaven. An' to think that our Miss Ethel here is to take up with a poor hairless cratur like that. Well, well, there's no accountin' for tastes! Maybe I'll marry a Dutchman myself one of these days."

And with that she began to climb the spiral staircase in the corner of the room.

"What sort of a man is he, your milord?" asked the Frenchwoman.

"He is not a bad sort at all," the Englishman answered. "Your young lady might do worse than 'ave 'im, you know--have him, I mean. I won't say but that 'e's been a bit fast in 'is time, you know; but that's nothin' to her now, is it? 'E's sowed his wild oats long ago, and 'e's ready to marry now and settle down."

"He is zen--_defraichi_--how you say--worn? your milord?" the Frenchwoman went on. "And mademoiselle is an angel of candor. Zey would give her _le bon Dieu_ wizout confession."

"Angel or no angel," returned Mr. Parsons, "there isn't any better catch in the three kingdoms than 'is lordship to-day. 'E's a earl, isn't 'e? And then there's the castle! Your young lady wouldn't be in a 'urry to let 'im go if she'd only seen the castle, now!"

"Mademoiselle has seen ze castle," was the answer.

"Well, I'll be damned!" said the valet.

"But yes," the French maid explained. "Last summer, in London, your milord was presented to mademoiselle, and he began to make his court. Fifteen days after, when we were at Leamington, mademoiselle and I, we go see your castle."

"It's a tip-topper now, ain't it?" he asked. "There's sometimes twenty and thirty of us in the servants' 'all, and there's goin's on, and larks, and all manner of sport. If this match comes off, now, between 'is lordship and your young lady, will you come with her or stay here with her mother?"

"Never of the life do I quit mademoiselle," the Frenchwoman responded.

"Then I'll 'ope to 'ave the honor of introducin' you into the best society at the castle whenever you come over," urged Mr. Parsons.

The Irish laundress now began to descend the spiral stairs. The cook also came into the room and went towards the dumb-waiter, carrying a silver platter, on which shook and shone a dozen little jellied cones.

"An' what might that be in thrimbles like that?" asked the Irishwoman, with curiosity.

"_Pate de foie gras en aspic_," the cook responded, curtly, sending up the dish and then returning silently to the kitchen.

"Patti's photograph?" repeated the laundress. "Do ye mind the impidence of her, tellin' me a lie like that?"

The English valet looked at the French maid and laughed. Then he explained, patronizingly:

"Patty de four grass, as we call it in French--not Patti's photograph. It's a delicacy, and it's made of goose livers."

"Then why couldn't that Dutch cook have said so?" the laundress asked, indignantly. "I've as good a right to know about a goose as ever she has. I misdoubt she was that poor where she came from they had never the grass of a goose to their cabin."

"Did you see 'is lordship?" asked the valet.

"I did that," the Irish girl replied, "an' what did I tell you about him? His head has grown through his hair! There's been good and bad harvests since he was young, I'm thinkin'--and it's mighty quare he looks about his eyes, too. It'll be a poor day for Miss Ethel when she marries a bald-headed ould runt like that, for all he's a lord!"

"Oh, I say, Miss Maggie; you must not speak so disrespectful of his lordship," Parsons insisted; "really, now, you mustn't."

"It's that Mrs. Playfair 'ud be the match for him, I'm thinkin'," said Maggie. "It's a bold-faced creature she is, an' no more clothes on her than ain't decent anyway. And then, how she looked at Mr. Van Allen and then at the bishop; and how she talked--I'd no patience with her. Do ye mind what it was I heard her say now?"

"How could we know what you 'eard her say?" the valet responded, impatiently.

"Sure, amn't I tellin' ye?" the Irish girl returned. "She was talkin' to the bishop, and she says, says she. 'The judge is a better man than you, bishop,' she says, 'leastwise he makes more people happy,' she says. 'How so?' says the bishop, says he. 'This way,' she says; 'when you marry a couple you make two people happy,' she says, 'an' when the judge divorces a couple he makes four people happy,' she says. Miss Ethel and the old lady with the white hair, they said nothin', but the rest of them laughed."

What further fragments of the conversation at the dinner-table up-stairs Maggie had been able to gather during her brief visit to the butler's-pantry could not then be made known to the other domestics, for Tim came slouching into the sitting-room.

"Say, Maggie," he began, "didn't you hear that ring at the bell? That's your feller--I seen him. He's out at the gate now."

"Is it the letter-man you mean?" asked Maggie, adjusting her hair as she passed the looking-glass.

"Ah, go on," returned Tim, impatiently, "what t'ell are you givin' us? How many fellers do you want, say?"

After Maggie had chased Tim out of the room, the Swedish cook went to the dumb-waiter once more to send up the four smoking canvas-backs that lay luxuriously on their cushions of fried hominy.

The French maid and the English valet continued to chat, discussing chiefly the personal peculiarities of the members of the households in which they had served. His former masters Parsons was willing enough to find fault with, but Lord Stanyhurst he seemed to think it a point of honor to defend. Mrs. Van Allen the Frenchwoman had no high opinion of, nor of Mr. Kortright Van Allen; but of their daughter, Miss Ethel Van Allen, she could not say too much in praise.

"I told that wild Irish girl that the marriage was arranged," said Parsons, "and I'm sure I 'ope so with all my heart, for 'is lordship needs money badly--I don't mind tellin' you, mam'zelle, 'e 'asn't paid me my wages this six months, not that I'd demean myself by askin' for them. But is it really settled, after all?--that's what I'd like to know."

"I zink so," the Frenchwoman responded; "you see, mademoiselle is not happy here. Monsieur and madame are at drawn knives. Zey have not spoken since two years."

"Mr. and Mrs. Van Allen don't speak to each other?" asked Parsons, with great interest. "But they must be speaking to each other there at dinner now."

"Oh, at dinner, yes," the French maid explained; "in the world, yes, zey talk zemselves. But at ze house, never a word. Zat is so sad for mademoiselle, is it not? It is not remarkable zat she marry herself with anybody to get out of ze house."

"Oh, ho!" rejoined the valet, "I see, I see! But if that's the way she's been brought up, you know, I don't believe she will 'it it off with 'is lordship."

"If he makes her not happy, your milord--" began the maid, forcibly, "but he must. He must render her happy, for she will have nobody to go to after ze marriage except her husband."

"Whatever do you mean by that?" asked Parsons, a little suspiciously.

"I know what I mean," she responded. "Monsieur and madame only attend till mademoiselle is married, and zen zey are divorced. Zey don't tell me zat, no--but I know."

"Yes," the valet admitted, "it ain't so very 'ard to find out a thing like that."

"And I know more yet," added the French maid. "I am not blind, am I? I can see that two and two make four, is it not? Zen, I tell you zat after ze marriage of mademoiselle, monsieur and madame are divorced, zat is one zing. Zen madame will marry zat Judge Gillespie, and monsieur will marry zat Madame Playfair--you see!"

"That would be a rum start, now, wouldn't it?" was the only comment of Parsons.

At this moment the portly form of Cato, the black butler, was seen descending the staircase in the corner of the room.

As soon as the aged negro's white head was visible he paused, and leaning over the light iron railing he addressed himself to the young Englishman.

"Misto' Parsons," he said, solemnly, "yo' lord knows a good thing when he gets it, sah! He tasted my celery salad, and he said to Mrs. Van Allen that he hadn't never eaten no better salad than that, sah, and I don't believe he never did, neither!"

So saying he slowly withdrew up-stairs again, as the cook advanced to the dumb-waiter carrying the Nesselrode pudding.

(1896.)

A WALL STREET WOOING

It had poured all the night before, and even now, at three o'clock in the afternoon, the air had the washed clearness that follows a warm rain. Fortunately the sun had shone forth before the church bells summoned the worshippers to kneel in front of the marble altars, banked high with scentless white flowers. It was Easter, and the first of April also; and, furthermore, the first warm Sunday of the spring. So the young men and maidens who clustered about the doors of the churches that afternoon were decked out in fresh apparel--the young men in light overcoats, and the maidens in all the bravery of their new bonnets.

In the corner of one of the cable-cars which were sliding along under the skeleton of the elevated railroad there sat a young man looking at his neighbors with begrudging interest, and pulling at the ends of an aggressive black mustache. Filson Shelby was not yet at home in the great city, and he knew it, and he silently protested against it. He was forever on the watch for a chance to resent the complacent attitude of city folks towards country people. Yet the metropolis had so far conquered him that his hat and his shoes and his clothes were city made.

It was six months now since the young Southwesterner had left his native village, and already he thought that he knew New York pretty well, from Harlem where he boarded to Wall Street where he worked. He was sure that he was well informed as to the customs of New-Yorkers, although the New-Yorkers changed their customs so rapidly that it was not so easy to be certain about this.

There were white flowers blossoming in the parlor windows of many of the houses in Fifty-third Street, through which the cable-car was passing, and as the car clanged around the curve and started on its way down Seventh Avenue it grazed the tail of a florist's wagon, the box of which was piled high with palms. Filson Shelby was aware that it was now a practice of New-Yorkers to give one another potted plants at Easter.

He had been told also that the habit no longer obtained of paying calls on Sunday afternoon; and none the less was he on his way down to Wall Street to take out for a walk the one girl in New York who seemed to him to have the unpretending simplicity of the girls of the Southwest. What did he care, he asked himself, whether or not it was fashionable to call on girls Sunday afternoon? What right had the New-Yorkers, anyhow, to assume that their way of doing things was the only right and proper way?

Having propounded these questions to himself, he answered them with a smile, for he had a saving sense of humor, and even a tendency towards self-analysis, and he had long ago detected his own pride in living in New York. In his earliest letters home he had expressed his delight in that he was now at the headquarters of the whole country; and he had written these letters on broad sheets of paper bought in the German quarter, and adorned with outline views of the sights of the city, picked out in the primary colors. He had sent missives thus decorated not only to his family and to his old friends, but even to mere acquaintances of his boyhood, for whom he cared little or nothing, except that they should know him to be settled in the metropolis. He could not but suspect that if he were now to go back to the village of his birth, he would seem as stuck-up to the natives as the New-Yorkers had seemed to him the first few weeks he was in the city.

The car slipped down Seventh Avenue, and stumbled into Broadway, and sped along sometimes with a smooth swiftness and again with a jerky hesitation. Gayly dressed family groups got on and got off, and the car had almost emptied itself by the time it came to Madison Square. Filson Shelby was greatly interested in the manners of two handsomely gowned girls who sat opposite to him, and who did not know each other very well. It struck him that one of them--the prettier of the two, as it happened--was a little uneasy in the other's company, and yet pleased to be seen with her. To his regret, both of them alighted at Grace Church, leaving only half a dozen people in the long car as it started again on its journey down-town.

He set down the plainer of the two as a member of the strange society known as the "Four Hundred," about which he had heard so much since he had been reading the Sunday papers. If he were right in this ascription, and if he were to judge by this sample, the girls of the Four Hundred were not a very good-looking lot, for all they were so stylishly dressed. It struck him, too, that this girl's manners were somehow offensive, although he could not state precisely where the offence lay.

He was glad that the one girl in New York whom he knew at all well had the easy good manners which spring from a naturally good heart. She was as well educated as the two girls who had just left the car; perhaps better, for she was going to graduate from the Normal College in two or three months; and yet she was unaffected and unassuming. As he phrased it in his mind, "she didn't put on any frills." He could chat with her just as easily as he used to talk to the girls who had gone to school with him at home. And yet when he considered how unlike she was really to these friends of his childhood he wondered why it was he and she had got along so well, and his thoughts went back to the occasion of his first meeting with her.

The car was now speeding swiftly down Broadway, obstructed by no carriages, no carts, no tracks, no wagons, and no drays. Below Astor Place the sidewalks were as bare as the street itself was empty. The shades were down in the windows of the many-storied buildings which towered above the deserted thoroughfare, and the flamboyant signs made their incessant appeals in vain. For a mile or more it was almost as though he were being carried through the avenues of an abandoned city. The one evidence of life, other than the cars themselves, was an infrequent bicyclist "riding the cable slot" up from the South Ferry. If only he had first arrived in New York in the restful quiet of a Sunday, so the young Southwesterner found himself thinking, perhaps the metropolis might not have seemed to him so overwhelming. As it was, it had been a shock to him to be plunged suddenly into the vortex of the immense city.

A telegrapher in the little town near which he was born, Filson Shelby had gone beyond his duty to oblige a New-Yorker who had chanced to be detained there for a fortnight, and the New-Yorker had repaid his courtesy by the proffer of a position as private operator in the office of a Wall Street friend. The young man had accepted eagerly, having no ties to bind him to his home; and yet he had felt desperately homesick more than once during his first three months in New York. Indeed, it was not until he had come to know Edna Leisler that he had reconciled himself to the great town, which was so crowded, and in which he was so alone. He was slow to form friendships, but he had made a few acquaintances.

It was one of these casual acquaintances who had taken him one day to the top of an old office building not far from the Stock Exchange. Here the janitor lived, and was allowed to use one of the rooms allotted to him as a lunch-room. The janitor's wife was a good cook, and Filson Shelby returned there again and again. One Saturday, when the room happened to be more crowded than usual, the rawboned and ruddy Irish girl was unable to serve everybody, and some time after he had given his order Filson Shelby was waited upon by a young lady in a neat brown dress. He was observant, and he saw a red spot burning on each cheek, and he noted that the lips were tightly set. It seemed to him that she was acting as waitress unwillingly, and yet at the same time that she was doing it of her own accord. He did not like to stare at her, and yet he could hardly take his eyes from her while she was in the room. She was not beautiful exactly, for she was but a slim slip of a girl, and she had coppery hair; and he had always been taught that red hair was ugly. Yet something about her took his fancy; perhaps it was her independent manner, perhaps it was rather her perky self-possession; perhaps, after all, it was the humorous expression which lurked in her eyes and at the corner of her mouth.

He had lingered over his luncheon that noon as long as he could, and then he was rewarded. The man who had first brought him there entered and took a seat beside him. When the young lady in brown came for his order the new-comer shook hands with her cordially, and called her "Miss Edna."

"She used to go to school with my sister," he explained to the young Southwesterner. "She's up at the Normal College now, and I've never seen her here in the dining-room before. But she has a holiday, and I suppose she thought she ought to help her mother out. It's her mother who cooks, you know--and boss cooking it is, too, isn't it?--real home sort of flavor about it."

Filson Shelby had still delayed his departure; and as Edna Leisler brought bread and butter, and went back again to the kitchen, his friend's chatter had streamed along.

"Red-hot hair, hasn't she?" was the next remark. "If there was half a dozen more of her you'd think it was a torchlight procession, wouldn't you? But it suits her style, don't it? Fact is, she's the only red-haired girl I ever saw I didn't hate at sight."

It seemed as though he had expected Filson to respond to this, and so the young Southwesterner hesitated, and cleared his throat, and admitted that her hair was red.

"Well, it _is_ just," the other returned. "I guess her barber has to wear asbestos gloves, eh? But she's a good girl, Edna is, if she is a brand from the burning. My sister used to be very fond of her, and I like her myself, though she isn't in our set exactly. I'll introduce you, if you like?"

The cable-car now came to a halt sharply to set down passengers for Brooklyn by way of the bridge, but Filson Shelby was wholly unconscious of this. He was busy with the recollection of that winter day when he had stood up with bashful awkwardness and had heard Edna Leisler say that she was pleased to meet him. He had the memory also of the next Saturday, when he had gone back to the little low eating-room under the roof in the hope of seeing her again, and of the unaffected frankness of her manner towards him when he met her on the stairway.

He remembered how simply she had accepted his invitation to go to Central Park to lunch on Washington's Birthday, the first holiday when they were both free, and he remembered, too, what a good time they had up there. It was on that Washington's Birthday that he had first found out that in the eyes of some people red hair was not a blemish, but a beauty. The omnibus in which they came down-town had been so crowded that they were separated, and he heard one well-dressed man say to his companion: "Did you ever see such stunning hair as that girl has? It is like burnished copper--except when the sun glints on it, and then it's like spun gold."

Hitherto he had been willing to overlook her aggressive locks in consideration of her good qualities, but thereafter he came rapidly to accept the view of the well-dressed man in the omnibus, and to look upon her red hair as a crown of glory. She did not seem any more attractive to him than she did at first meeting, but he knew now that other men might be attracted also. He wondered whether there were any other men whom she knew as well as she knew him. It seemed to him that they had taken to each other at the start, and they were now very good friends indeed. But there was no reason why she should not have other friends also.

The current of his retrospection was not so sweeping that he could not follow the course of the cable-car in which he was seated, and just then he saw the brown spire of Trinity Church and heard the clock strike three. He signalled to the conductor, and the car stopped before the church door and at the head of Wall Street.

As he stood looking down the crooked street, washed white by the rain and looking clean in the April sunshine, he asked himself why he was going to meet Edna Leisler--and especially why it was his heart had slowed up at the suggestion that perhaps other men were as attentive to her as he was. He was not in love with her, was he? That she had made New York tolerable to him he was ready to admit, and also that he liked her better than any girl he had ever met. But if he was jealous of her, did not that prove that he loved her?

These were the questions he propounded as he walked from Broadway to the old building on the top floor of which the Leislers lived. When Edna Leisler came down-stairs to meet him, with her new Easter hat, he knew the answers to these questions; he knew that he would be miserable if he were to lose the privilege of her society; he knew furthermore that he had loved her since the first day he had seen her, even though he had not hitherto suspected it. He knew also that he would never have a better chance to tell her that he loved her than he would have that afternoon; and while they were shaking hands he made up his mind that before he took her back to her mother's he would get her promise to marry him.

With this resolve fixed, he took refuge in the commonplace.

"Am I late?" he asked.

"Five minutes," she answered. "I didn't know but what you were going to April-fool me."

"Oh, Miss Edna," he cried, "you know I wouldn't do that!"

"I didn't think you would really," she laughed back. "And I felt sure I could get even with you if you did."

Thus lightly chatting, they came to the corner of Broad Street.

"Shall we go down to the Battery?" he suggested, thinking that he might find a chance there to say what was in his heart.

"Yes," she assented; "it'll be first-rate to get a whiff of the salt breeze. It's as warm as spring to-day, isn't it?"

In front of the Stock Exchange, and for two or three blocks below, Broad Street was absolutely bare, except for a little knot of men working over a man-hole of the electrical conduit. The ten-story buildings lifted themselves aloft on both sides of the street, without any evidence of life from window or doorway; they were as silent and seemingly empty as though they belonged to a deserted city of the plains. Bar-rooms in cellars had bock-beer placards before their closed portals. On the glass panel of the swing-door which admitted the week-day passer-by to the Business Men's Quick Lunch there was wafered the bill of fare of the day before, but the door itself was closed tight. So were the entrances to more pretentious restaurants.

But as Filson Shelby and Edna Leisler went on farther down-town, Broad Street slowly changed its character. There were not so many office buildings and more retail shops; there were a few wholesale warehouses; there were even cheap flat-houses; and there were more signs of life. Children began to fill the roadway and the sidewalks. There were boys on tri-cycles, and there were Little Mothers pushing perambulators in which babies lay asleep. There were girls on roller-skates; and one of these, a tall, lanky child, had a frolicsome black poodle, which pulled her quickly along the sidewalk.

Seeing some of these things, and not seeing others, and being taken up wholly by their own talk, the young Southwesterner and the New York girl passed through Whitehall Street and came out on the Battery. They walked to the edge of the water, and looked across the waves to the Statue of Liberty holding her torch aloft. An Italian steamer full of immigrants was just coming up from Quarantine. The afternoon was clear, after the rain of the night before, and yet there was a haze on the horizon. The huge grain-elevators over on the Jersey shore stood out against the sky defiantly.

A fringe of men and women sat on the seats around the grass-plots and along the sea-wall. Many of the women had children in their arms or at their skirts. Most of the men were reading the gaudily illustrated Sunday newspapers; some of them were smoking. The sea-breeze blew mildly, with a foretaste of warm weather. The grass-plots were brownish-gray, with but the barest touch of green at the edges, and there was never a bud yet on any of the skeleton trees. None the less did every one know that the winter was gone for good, and that any day almost the spring might come in with a rush.

As Filson Shelby looked about him he saw more than one young couple sitting side by side on the benches or sauntering languidly along the winding walks, and he knew that he was not the only young fellow who felt the stirring of the season. No one of the other girls was as good-looking as Edna, nor as stylish; he saw this at half a glance. With every minute his desire grew to tell her how dear she was to him, and still he put it off and put it off. Once or twice when she spoke to him he left her remark unanswered, and then hastily begged her pardon for his rudeness. He did not quite know what he was saying, and he feared that she must think him a fool. He was restless, too, and it seemed to him quite impossible to ask her to marry him in such an exposed place as the Battery.

"Suppose we go up to Trinity Church?" he suggested. "It's always quiet enough in the graveyard there."

"Isn't it quiet enough here?" she asked, as they turned their footsteps away from Castle Garden.

"It isn't really noisy, I'll admit," he responded; "but I get mighty tired of those elevated trains snorting along over the back of my head, don't you?"

She gave him a queer little look out of the corner of her eye, and then she laughed lightly.

"Oh, well," she replied, "if you think Trinity Church Yard is a better place, I don't mind."

Then her cheeks suddenly flamed crimson, and she turned away her head.

They were now crossing the barren space under the elevated railroad, and, as it happened, the young man did not see her swift blush.

As they skirted the oval of Bowling Green the girl nodded to a gray-coated policeman on guard over the little park.

"Who's that?" asked the young man, acutely jealous, although he saw that the officer was not less than fifty years old.

"That's Mr. O'Rourke," she explained. "He's Rose O'Rourke's father. She was graduated from the Normal College only two years ago, and then she went on the stage. She's getting on splendidly, too. She played Queen Elizabeth last year--and didn't she look it? I'm sure she's a great deal handsomer than that old Queen was."

"But that old Queen," he returned, "wasn't the daughter of a sparrow-cop--that's what you call them, don't you?"

"I don't call them so," she responded, "for I think it's vulgar to talk slang."

"But the boys do call a park policeman a sparrow-cop, don't they?" he persisted.

"The little boys do," she answered, "but I know Mr. O'Rourke doesn't like it."

"I can understand that," he replied. "If I had Queen Elizabeth for a daughter, I think I should want to be a king myself."

"Well," the girl went on to explain, "Rose did want him to give up his appointment. She said she was earning enough for her father not to work. But he wouldn't, for all she urged him. She's a kind girl, is Rose, and not a bit stuck-up. She came up to the college last year and recited for us. You should have heard her do 'Curfew shall not ring to-night'; I tell you she was splendid."

"I don't believe she did it any better than you could," he declared.

"Oh, don't you?" she returned, heartily; "that's only because you didn't hear her. And she was very nice to me, too. She complimented me on my piece."

"What did you speak?" he asked.

"Oh, I always choose something fiery and patriotic. I spoke 'Sheridan's Ride' first, and then, when the girls encored me, I spoke 'Old Ironsides'--but I like 'Sheridan's Ride' best; and Rose O'Rourke said I got more out of it than anybody she had ever heard. But then she always was so complimentary."

"I reckon she knows it's lucky for her you don't go on the stage," the lover asserted. "It would be a cold day for her if you did. I haven't seen her, but I'm sure she isn't such a good looker as you are!"

"Thank you for the compliment," the girl answered. "If we weren't here in Broadway, in front of Trinity Church, I'd drop you a courtesy. But you wouldn't say that if you had seen her, for she's as pretty as a picture."

"Do you mean that she is as fresh as paint?" he asked.

"That's real mean of you," she retorted, "for Rose doesn't need to paint at all, even on the stage; she has just the loveliest complexion."

"She's not the only girl in New York who has a lovely complexion," he declared; and again the color rose swiftly on her cheek, and then as swiftly faded.

They had now come to the gates of Trinity Church, and they saw a little stream of men and women pouring in to attend the afternoon service.

"You must not be down on Rose," the girl said, as they turned away from Broadway and began to ramble slowly amid the tombstones. "She's a good friend of mine. She said she'd get me an engagement if I'd go on the stage--"

"But you are not going to?" he broke in, earnestly.

"I'd love to," she answered, calmly. "But I'm too big a coward. I'd never dare stand up before the people in a great big theatre and feel they were all looking at me."

"I'm glad you're not going to," he declared.

"It would be too delightful for anything!" she asserted; "but I'd never have the courage. I know I wouldn't, so I've given up the idea. I'll finish my course at the college, and get my diploma, and then I'll be a teacher--that is, if I can get an appointment. But it isn't easy if you haven't any influence; and father doesn't take any interest in politics, and he doesn't know any of the trustees of this district, and I can't see how I'm ever to get into a school. Now Mr. O'Rourke could help me if he wanted--"

"The sparrow-cop?" interrupted the young Southwesterner. "Why, what has he got to do with the public schools?"

"Mr. O'Rourke has a great deal of influence in this ward, I can tell you that," she returned. "He has a pull on more than one of the trustees. If he were to back me, I'd get my position sure! And maybe I had better go to Rose and ask her for her father's influence."

They were now almost in the centre of that part of the church-yard which lies above the church, and behind the monument to the American prisoners who died during the British occupancy of New York. The afternoon service was about to begin, and the solemn tones of the organ were audible where they stood.

It seemed to Filson Shelby that the time had come for him to speak.

He swallowed a lump in his throat, and began.

"Miss Edna," he said, hesitatingly, "why do you want to be a school-teacher?"

"To earn my living, to be sure!" she answered, calmly enough, although the color was rising again on her cheeks.

"But you don't need ever so many scholars to earn your living, do you?" he asked, gaining courage slowly.

"What do you mean?" she returned, forcing herself to look him in the face.

"I mean," he responded, "that I don't see why you couldn't earn your living just as well by having only one scholar--"

"Only one scholar?" she echoed.

"Yes--only one scholar," he declared; "but you could take him for life. And you could teach him everything that was good and true and beautiful--and he would work hard for you, and try and make you happy."

The color ebbed from her cheeks, but she said nothing. The low notes of the organ were dying away, and on the elevated railroad just behind the young couple a train came hissing along wreathed in swirling steam.

"I'm not worthy of you, Edna; I know that only too well; but you can make me ever so much better if you'll only try," he urged. "I love you with my whole heart--that's what I've been trying to say. Will you marry me?"

She raised her eyes to his and simply answered,

"Yes."

An hour later, as they were going through the dropping twilight down Wall Street to the old office building, on the top floor of which she lived with her parents, they were still talking of each other, of their united future, and of their separate past.

When they came to the door and stood at the foot of the five flights of stairs that led up to the janitor's apartment, they had still many things to say to each other.

What seemed to Filson Shelby most astonishing was that he should now be engaged to be married, when that very morning he was not even aware of his love for her. And being a very young fellow, and, moreover, being very much in love, he could not keep this astonishing thing to himself, but must needs tell her.

"Do you know, Edna," he began, "that I must have been in love with you a long while without knowing it? Isn't that most extraordinary? And it was only this morning that I found it out!"

Standing on the stairs above him, and just out of his reach, she broke into a merry little laugh, and the tendrils of red hair quivered around her broad brow.

"What are you laughing at?" he asked.

"Oh, nothing," she answered, and then she laughed again. "At least, not much. It is only because men are so much slower to see things than women are."

"What do you mean?" he asked again.

"Well," she returned, laughing once more, and retreating two or three steps higher up the stairs, "I mean that you say you only found out this morning that you were in love with me--"

"Yes?"

"Well," she continued, making ready for flight, "I found it out more than two months ago."

(1895.)

A SPRING FLOOD IN BROADWAY