As yet the tension of popular excitement had not jaded the capacity of the city for pleasure.  People were ready for excitement, welcomed it after the dreadful year of lethargy.  Stocks fell, but the theatres were the fuller; Joseph Jefferson at Winter Garden, Wallack at his own theatre, “The Seven Sisters” at Laura Keene’s, drew unsatisfied crowds, galloping headlong on the heels of pleasure.

Philharmonics, plays, burlesques, concerts, minstrel entertainments, never lacked audiences, especially when the proceeds were destined for the Union Defence Committee; the hotels, Bancroft, St. Nicholas, Metropolitan, New York, Fifth Avenue, were all brilliantly thronged at night; cafes and concert halls like the Gaieties, Canterbury, and American, flourished and flaunted their advertisements; grills, restaurants, saloons, multiplied.  There were none too many for Berkley’s amusement.

As yet no battle lightning flickered along the Southern horizon to sober folk with premonition; but the nightly illumination of the metropolis was becoming tinged with a more sinister reflection where licence had already begun to lift a dozen hydra-heads from certain lurid resorts hitherto limited in number and in impudence.

It was into the streets of such a city, a meaner, dirtier, uglier, noisier, perhaps more vicious edition of the French metropolis of the Third Empire, thronged with fantastic soldiery and fox-eyed contractors, filled already with new faces—­faces of Western born, Yankee born, foreign born; stupid faces, crafty faces, hard faces, bedizened faces—­it was into the streets of such a city that Berkley sauntered twice a day to and fro from his office, regretting only that his means did not permit him to go to the devil like a gentleman.

And one day, out of the hurly-burly, and against all laws of probability and finance, an incredible letter was handed to him.  And he read it, standing by his window, and calmly realised that he was now no longer penniless.

Some inspired idiot had become a credulous market for his apparently unmarketable securities.  Who this person was his brokers did not say; but, whoever it was, had bought every rotten share he held; and there was money for him in the world to help him out of it.

As he stood there, the letter in his hands, drums sounded across the street, and Stephen came in from the outer office.

“Another regiment,” he said.  “Do you know where they come from?”

Berkley shook his head, and they went to the windows; below them surged the flood of dead wood driven before the oncoming waves—­haggard men, ragged men, small boys, darkies, Bowery b’hoys, stray red-shirted firemen, then the police, then solid double ranks of drums battered by flashing, brass-bound drumsticks, then line after line of blue and steel, steadily flowing through the streets and away, away into the unknown.

“How young they are!” muttered Farren, the gray-haired cashier, standing behind Stephen’s shoulders.  “God bless me, they’re children!”