Hazard of New Fortunes, a — Volume 4 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 129 pages of information about Hazard of New Fortunes, a — Volume 4.

Hazard of New Fortunes, a — Volume 4 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 129 pages of information about Hazard of New Fortunes, a — Volume 4.

In other walks the Marches tried to find some of the streets they had wandered through the first day of their wedding journey in New York, so long ago.  They could not make sure of them; but once they ran down to the Battery, and easily made sure of that, though not in its old aspect.  They recalled the hot morning, when they sauntered over the trodden weed that covered the sickly grass-plots there, and sentimentalized the sweltering paupers who had crept out of the squalid tenements about for a breath of air after a sleepless night.  Now the paupers were gone, and where the old mansions that had fallen to their use once stood, there towered aloft and abroad those heights and masses of many-storied brick-work for which architecture has yet no proper form and aesthetics no name.  The trees and shrubs, all in their young spring green, blew briskly over the guarded turf in the south wind that came up over the water; and in the well-paved alleys the ghosts of eighteenth-century fashion 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. 

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Hazard of New Fortunes, a — Volume 4 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.