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+Project Gutenberg's The Story of a New York House, by Henry Cuyler Bunner
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Story of a New York House
+
+Author: Henry Cuyler Bunner
+
+Illustrator: A. B. Frost
+
+Release Date: December 13, 2009 [EBook #30662]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF A NEW YORK HOUSE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Geetu Melwani, Rob Reid, David Garcia and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+(This book was produced from scanned images of public
+domain material from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Then out of the door came Jacob Dolph.]
+
+
+
+
+          THE STORY
+
+              OF
+
+       A NEW YORK HOUSE
+
+              BY
+
+         H. C. BUNNER
+
+
+  _ILLUSTRATED BY A. B. FROST_
+
+
+           NEW YORK
+    CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+             1887
+
+
+
+
+      COPYRIGHT, 1887, BY
+    CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.
+
+
+   Press of J. J. Little & Co.
+     Astor Place, New York.
+
+
+
+
+              TO
+
+           A. L. B.
+
+
+
+
+  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+  _Then out of the door came Jacob Dolph_                FRONTISPIECE
+
+                                                                 PAGE
+
+  _"I thumped him"_                                                14
+
+  _"It's a monstrous great place for a country-house, Mr. Dolph"_  18
+
+  _There was only one idea, and that was flight_                   28
+
+  _The light flickered on the top of the church spire_             32
+              (_By F. Hopkinson Smith._)
+
+  _They hesitated a second, looking at the great arm chair_        37
+
+  _"Stay there, sir--you, sir, you, Jacob Dolph!"_                 41
+
+  _After awhile he began to take timorous strolls_                 46
+
+  _Jacob Dolph the elder ... stood on his hearth rug_              51
+
+  _And then he marched off to bed by himself, suffering no one to
+  go with him_                                                     55
+
+  _In quiet morning hours ... when his daughter sat at his feet_   77
+
+  _"Mons'us gran dinneh, seh!"_                                    79
+
+  _"All of a sudden, chock forward he went, right on his face"_    83
+
+  _He heard the weak, spasmodic wail of another Dolph_             88
+
+  _"Central American," said the clerk_                            107
+
+  _"Looks like his father," was Mr. Daw's comment_                109
+
+  _O'Reagan of Castle Reagan_                                     118
+
+  _"If it hadn't been for the Dolphs, devil the rattle you'd
+  have had"_                                                      120
+
+  _"I know'd you'd take me in, Mist' Dolph," he panted_           132
+
+  _"Have you got a nigger here?"_                                 133
+
+  _Abram Van Riper makes a business communication._               141
+
+  _And so she set his necktie right, and he went_                 144
+
+  _Looking on his face, she saw death quietly coming upon him_    149
+
+  _Finial_                                                        151
+
+
+
+
+           THE STORY
+
+       OF A NEW YORK HOUSE.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+
+"I hear," said Mrs. Abram Van Riper, seated at her breakfast-table, and
+watching the morning sunlight dance on the front of the great Burrell
+house on the opposite side of Pine Street, "that the Dolphs are going to
+build a prodigious fine house out of town--somewhere up near the
+Rynders's place."
+
+"And I hear," said Abram Van Riper, laying down last night's _Evening
+Post_, "that Jacob Dolph is going to give up business. And if he does,
+it's a disgrace to the town."
+
+It was in the summer of 1807, and Abram Van Riper was getting well over
+what he considered the meridian line of sixty years. He was hale and
+hearty; his business was flourishing; his boy was turning out all that
+should have been expected of one of the Van Riper stock; the refracted
+sunlight from the walls of the stately house occupied by the Cashier of
+the Bank of the United States lit with a subdued secondary glimmer the
+Van Riper silver on the breakfast-table--the squat teapot and slop-bowl,
+the milk-pitcher, that held a quart, and the apostle-spoon in the broken
+loaf-sugar on the Delft plate. Abram Van Riper was decorously happy, as
+a New York merchant should be. In all other respects, he was pleased to
+think, he was what a New York merchant should be, and the word of the
+law and the prophets was fulfilled with him and in his house.
+
+"I'm sure," Mrs. Van Riper began again, somewhat querulously, "I can't
+see why Jacob Dolph shouldn't give up business, if he's so minded. He's
+a monstrous fortune, from all I hear--a good hundred thousand dollars."
+
+"A hundred thousand dollars!" repeated her husband, scornfully. "Ay, and
+twice twenty thousand pounds on the top of that. He's done well, has
+Dolph. All the more reason he should stick to his trade; and not go to
+lolling in the sun, like a runner at the Custom-House door. He's not
+within ten years of me, and here he must build his country house, and
+set up for the fine gentleman. Jacob Dolph! Did I go on his note, when
+he came back from France, brave as my master, in '94, or did I not? And
+where 'ud he have raised twenty thousand in this town, if I hadn't?
+What's got into folks nowadays? Damn me if I can see!"
+
+His wife protested, in wifely fashion. "I'm sure, Van Riper," she began,
+"you've no need to fly in such a huff if I so much as speak of folks who
+have some conceit of being genteel. It's only proper pride of Mr. Dolph
+to have a country house, and--" (her voice faltering a little,
+timorously) "ride in and--and out----"
+
+"_Ride!_" snorted Mr. Van Riper. "In a carriage, maybe?"
+
+"In a carriage, Van Riper. You may think to ride in a carriage is like
+being the Pope of Rome; but there's some that knows better. And if you'd
+set up your carriage," went on the undaunted Mrs. Van Riper, "and gone
+over to Greenwich Street two years ago, as I'd have had you, and made
+yourself friendly with those people there, I'd have been on the Orphan
+Asylum Board at this very minute; and _you_ would----"
+
+Mr. Van Riper knew all that speech by heart, in all its variations. He
+knew perfectly well what it would end in, this time, although he was not
+a man of quick perception: "He would have been a member of the new
+Historical Society."
+
+"Yes," he thought to himself, as he found his hat and shuffled out into
+Pine Street; "and John Pintard would have had my good check in his
+pocket for his tuppenny society. Pine Street is fine enough for me."
+
+Mr. Van Riper had more cause for his petulancy than he would have
+acknowledged even to himself. He was a man who had kept his shop open
+all through Clinton's occupancy, and who had had no trouble with the
+British. And when they were gone he had had to do enough to clear his
+skirts of any smirch of Toryism, and to implant in his own breast a
+settled feeling of militant Americanism. He did not like it that the
+order of things should change--and the order of things was changing.
+The town was growing out of all knowledge of itself. Here they had their
+Orphan Asylum, and their Botanical Garden, and their Historical Society;
+and the Jews were having it all their own way; and now people were
+talking of free schools, and of laying out a map for the upper end of
+the town to grow on, in the "system" of straight streets and avenues. To
+the devil with systems and avenues! said he. That was all the doing of
+those cursed Frenchmen. He knew how it would be when they brought their
+plaguy frigate here in the first fever year--'93--and the fools marched
+up from Peck's Slip after a red nightcap, and howled their cut-throat
+song all night long.
+
+It began to hum itself in his head as he walked toward Water Street--_Ça
+ira--ça ira--les aristocrats à la lanterne_. A whiff of the wind that
+blew through Paris streets in the terrible times had come across the
+Atlantic and tickled his dull old Dutch nostrils.
+
+But something worse than this vexed the conservative spirit of Abram Van
+Riper. He could forgive John Pintard--whose inspiration, I think,
+foreran the twentieth century--his fancy for free schools and historical
+societies, as he had forgiven him his sidewalk-building fifteen years
+before; he could proudly overlook the fact that the women were busying
+themselves with all manner of wild charities; he could be contented
+though he knew that the Hebrew Hart was president of that merchants'
+club at Baker's, of which he himself would fain have been a member. But
+there was some thing in the air that he could neither forgive nor
+overlook, nor be contented with.
+
+There was a change coming over the town--a change which he could not
+clearly define, even in his own mind. There was a great keeping of
+carriages, he knew. A dozen men had bought carriages, or were likely to
+buy them at any time. The women were forming societies for the
+improvement of this and that. And he, who had moved up-town from Dock
+Street, was now in an old-fashioned quarter. All this he knew, but the
+something which made him uneasy was more subtile.
+
+Within the last few years he had observed an introduction of certain
+strange distinctions in the social code of the town. It had been vaguely
+intimated to him--perhaps by his wife, he could not remember--that there
+was a difference between his trade and Jacob Dolph's trade. He was a
+ship-chandler. Jacob Dolph sold timber. Their shops were side by side;
+Jacob Dolph's rafts lay in the river in front of Abram Van Riper's shop,
+and Abram Van Riper had gone on Jacob Dolph's note, only a few years
+ago. Yet, it seemed that it was _genteel_ of Jacob Dolph to sell timber,
+and it was not genteel of Abram Van Riper to be a ship-chandler. There
+was, then, a difference between Jacob Dolph and Abram Van Riper--a
+difference which, in forty years, Abram Van Riper had never conceived
+of. There were folks who held thus. For himself, he did not understand
+it. What difference there was between selling the wood to make a ship,
+and selling the stores to go inside of her, he could not understand.
+
+The town was changing for the worse; he saw that. He did not wish--God
+forbid!--that his son John should go running about to pleasure-gardens.
+But it would be no more than neighborly if these young bucks who went
+out every night should ask him to go with them. Were William Irving's
+boys and Harry Brevoort and those young Kembles too fine to be friends
+with his boy? Not that he'd go with them a-rollicking--no, not that--but
+'twould be neighborly. It was all wrong, he thought; they were going
+whither they knew not, and wherefore they knew not; and with that he
+cursed their airs and their graces, and pounded down to the Tontine, to
+put his name at the head of the list of those who subscribed for a
+testimonial service of plate, to be presented to our esteemed
+fellow-citizen and valued associate, Jacob Dolph, on his retirement from
+active business.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jacob Dolph at this moment was setting forth from his house in State
+Street, whose pillared balcony, rising from the second floor to the
+roof, caught a side glance of the morning sun, that loved the Battery
+far better than Pine Street. He had his little boy by the hand--young
+Jacob, his miniature, his heir, and the last and only living one of his
+eight children. Mr. Dolph walked with his stock thrust out and the lower
+end of his waistcoat drawn in--he was Colonel Dolph, if he had cared to
+keep the title; and had come back from Monmouth with a hole in his hip
+that gave him a bit of a limp, even now in eighteen-hundred-and-seven.
+He and the boy marched forth like an army with a small but enthusiastic
+left wing, into the poplar-studded Battery. The wind blew fresh off the
+bay; the waves beat up against the seawall, and swirled with a chuckle
+under Castle Garden bridge. A large brig was coming up before the wind,
+all her sails set, as though she were afraid--and she was--of British
+frigates outside the Hook. Two or three fat little boats, cat-rigged,
+after the good old New York fashion, were beating down toward Staten
+Island, to hunt for the earliest blue-fish.
+
+The two Dolphs crossed the Battery, where the elder bowed to his friends
+among the merchants who lounged about the city's pleasure-ground, lazily
+chatting over their business affairs. Then they turned up past Bowling
+Green into Broadway, where Mr. Dolph kept on bowing, for half the town
+was out, taking the fresh morning for marketing and all manner of
+shopping. Everybody knew Jacob Dolph afar off by his blue coat with the
+silver buttons, his nankeen waistcoat, and his red-checked Indian silk
+neckcloth. He made it a sort of uniform. Captain Beare had brought him a
+bolt of nankeen and a silk kerchief every year since 1793, when Mr.
+Dolph gave him credit for the timber of which the _Ursa Minor_ was
+built.
+
+And everybody seemed willing to make acquaintance with young Jacob's
+London-made kerseymere breeches, of a bright canary color, and with his
+lavender silk coat, and with his little _chapeau de Paris_. Indeed,
+young Jacob was quite the most prominent moving spectacle on Broadway,
+until they came to John Street, and saw something rolling down the
+street that quite cut the yellow kerseymeres out of all popular
+attention.
+
+This was a carriage, the body of which was shaped like a huge section of
+a cheese, set up on its small end upon broad, swinging straps between
+two pairs of wheels. It was not unlike a piece of cheese in color, for
+it was of a dull and faded grayish-green, like mould, relieved by
+pale-yellow panels and gilt ornaments. It was truly an interesting
+structure, and it attracted nearly as much notice on Broadway in 1807 as
+it might to-day. But it was received with far more reverence, for it was
+a court coach, and it belonged to the Des Anges family, the rich
+Huguenots of New Rochelle. It had been built in France, thirty years
+before, and had been sent over as a present to his brother from the
+Count des Anges, who had himself neglected to make use of his
+opportunities to embrace the Protestant religion.
+
+When the white-haired old lady who sat in this coach, with a very little
+girl by her side, saw Mr. Dolph and his son, she leaned out of the
+window and signalled to the old periwigged driver to stop, and he drew
+up close to the sidewalk. And then Mr. Dolph and his son came up to the
+window and took off their hats, and made a great low bow and a small low
+bow to the old lady and the little girl.
+
+"Madam Des Anges," said Mr. Dolph, with an idiom which he had learned
+when he was presented at the court of Louis the Sixteenth, "has surely
+not driven down from New Rochelle this morning? That would tax even her
+powers."
+
+Madam Des Anges did not smile--she had no taste for smiling--but she
+bridled amiably.
+
+"No, Mr. Dolph," she replied; "I have been staying with my
+daughter-in-law, at her house at King's Bridge, and I have come to town
+to put my little granddaughter to school. She is to have the privilege
+of being a pupil of Mme. Dumesnil."
+
+Madam Des Anges indicated the little girl with a slight movement, as
+though she did not wish to allow the child more consideration than a
+child deserved. The little girl turned a great pair of awed eyes, first
+on her grandmother, and then on the gentlemen, and spoke no word. Young
+Jacob Dolph stared hard at her, and then contemplated his kerseymeres
+with lazy satisfaction. He had no time for girls. And a boy who had his
+breeches made in London was a boy of consequence, and need not concern
+himself about every one he saw.
+
+"And this is your son, I make no doubt," went on Madam Des Anges; "you
+must bring him to see us at King's Bridge, while we are so near you.
+These young people should know each other."
+
+Mr. Dolph said he would, and showed a becoming sense of the honor of the
+invitation; and he made young Jacob say a little speech of thanks, which
+he did with a doubtful grace; and then Mr. Dolph sent his compliments to
+Madam Des Anges' daughter-in-law, and Madam Des Anges sent her
+compliments to Mrs. Dolph, and there was more stately bowing, and the
+carriage lumbered on, with the little girl looking timorously out of the
+window, her great eyes fixed on the yellow kerseymeres, as they twinkled
+up the street.
+
+"Papa," said young Jacob, as they turned the corner of Ann Street, "when
+may I go to a boys' school? I'm monstrous big to be at Mrs. Kilmaster's.
+And I don't like to be a girl-boy."
+
+"Are you a girl-boy?" inquired his father, smiling.
+
+"Aleck Cameron called me one yesterday. He said I was a girl-boy because
+I went to dame-school. He called me Missy, too!" the boy went on, with
+his breast swelling.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"We'll see about it," said Mr. Dolph, smiling again; and they walked on
+in silence to Mrs. Kilmaster's door, where he struck the knocker, and a
+neat mulatto girl opened the narrow door. Then he patted his boy on the
+head and bade him good-by for the morning, and told him to be a good boy
+at school. He took a step or two and looked back. Young Jacob lingered
+on the step, as if he had a further communication to make. He paused.
+
+"I thumped him," said young Jacob, and the narrow door swallowed him up.
+
+Mr. Dolph continued on his walk up Broadway. As he passed the upper end
+of the Common he looked with interest at the piles of red sandstone
+among the piles of white marble, where they were building the new City
+Hall. The Council had ordered that the rear or northward end of the
+edifice should be constructed of red stone; because red stone was cheap,
+and none but a few suburbans would ever look down on it from above
+Chambers Street. Mr. Dolph shook his head. He thought he knew better. He
+had watched the growth of trade; he knew the room for further growth; he
+had noticed the long converging lines of river-front, with their
+unbounded accommodation for wharves and slips. He believed that the day
+would come--and his own boy might see it--when the business of the city
+would crowd the dwelling-houses from the river side, east and west, as
+far, maybe, as Chambers Street. He had no doubt that the boy might find
+himself, forty years from then, in a populous and genteel neighborhood.
+Perhaps he foresaw too much; but he had a jealous yearning for a house
+that should be a home for him, and for his child, and for his
+grandchildren. He wanted a place where his wife might have a garden; a
+place which the boy would grow up to love and cherish, where the boy
+might bring a wife some day. And even if it were a little out of
+town--why, his wife did not want a rout every night; and it was likely
+his old friends would come out and see him once in a while, and smoke a
+pipe in his garden and eat a dish of strawberries, perhaps.
+
+As he thought it all over for the hundredth time, weighing for and
+against in his gentle and deliberative mind, he strolled far out of
+town. There was a house here and there on the road--a house with a trim,
+stiff little garden, full of pink and white and blue flowers in orderly,
+clam-shell-bordered beds. But it was certainly, he had to admit, as he
+looked about him, very _countrified_ indeed. It seemed that the city
+must lose itself if it wandered up here among these rolling meadows and
+wooded hills. Yet even up here, half way to Greenwich Village, there
+were little outposts of the town--clumps of neighborly houses, mostly of
+the poorer class, huddling together to form small nuclei for sporadic
+growth. There was one on his right, near the head of Collect Street.
+Perhaps that quizzical little old German was right, who had told him
+that King's Bridge property was a rational investment.
+
+He went across the hill where Grand Street crosses Broadway, and up past
+what was then North and is to-day Houston Street, and then turned down a
+straggling road that ran east and west. He walked toward the Hudson, and
+passed a farmhouse or two, and came to a bare place where there were no
+trees, and only a few tangled bushes and ground-vines.
+
+Here a man was sitting on a stone, awaiting him. As he came near, the
+man arose.
+
+"Ah, it's you, Weeks? And have you the plan?"
+
+"Yes, Colonel--Mr. Dolph. I've put the window where you want it--that
+is, my brother Levi did--though I don't see as you're going to have much
+trouble in looking over anything that's likely to come between you and
+the river."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Mr. Dolph took the crisp roll of parchment and studied it with loving
+interest. It had gone back to Ezra Weeks, the builder, and his brother
+Levi, the architect, for the twentieth time, perhaps. Was there ever an
+architect's plan put in the hands of a happy nest-builder where the
+windows did not go up and down from day to day, and the doors did not
+crawl all around the house, and the veranda did not contract and expand
+like a sensitive plant; or where the rooms and closets and corridors did
+not march backward and forward and in and out at the bidding of every
+fond, untutored whim?
+
+"It's a monstrous great big place for a country-house, Mr. Dolph," said
+Ezra Weeks, as he looked over Jacob Dolph's shoulder at the drawings of
+the house, and shook his head with a sort of pitying admiration for the
+projector's audacity.
+
+They talked for a while, and looked at the site as if they might see
+more in it than they saw yesterday, and then Weeks set off for the city,
+pledged to hire laborers and to begin the work on the morrow.
+
+"I think I can get you some of that stone that's going into the back of
+the City Hall, if you say so, Mr. Dolph. That stone was bought cheap,
+you know--bought for the city."
+
+"See what you can do, Weeks," said Mr. Dolph; and Mr. Weeks went
+whistling down the road.
+
+Jacob Dolph walked around his prospective domain. He kicked a wild
+blackberry bush aside, to look at the head of a stake, and tried to
+realize that that would be the corner of his house. He went to where the
+parlor fireplace would be, and stared at the grass and stones, wondering
+what it would be like to watch the fire flickering on the new hearth.
+Then he looked over toward the Hudson, and saw the green woods on Union
+Hill and the top of a white sail over the high river-bank. He hoped that
+no one would build a large house between him and the river.
+
+He lingered so long that the smoke of midday dinners was arising from
+Greenwich Village when he turned back toward town. When he reached the
+Commons on his homeward way he came across a knot of idlers who were
+wasting the hour of the noontide meal in gaping at the unfinished
+municipal building.
+
+They were admiringly critical. One man was vociferously enthusiastic.
+
+"It's a marvellous fine building, say I, sir! Worthy of the classic
+shades of antiquity. If Europe can show a finer than that will be when
+she's done, then, in _my_ opinion, sir, Europe is doing well."
+
+"You admire the architecture, Mr. Huggins?" asked Mr. Dolph, coming up
+behind him. Mr. Huggins turned around, slightly disconcerted, and
+assumed an amiability of manner such as can only be a professional
+acquirement among us poor creatures of human nature.
+
+"Ah, Mr. Dolph--Colonel, I should say! I have purposed to do myself the
+honor of presenting myself at your house this afternoon, Colonel Dolph,
+to inquire if you did not desire to have your peruke _frisée_. For I had
+taken the liberty of observing you in conversation with Madam Des Anges
+this morning, in her equipage, and it had occurred to me that possibly
+the madam might be a-staying with you."
+
+"Madam Des Anges does not honor my house this time, Huggins," returned
+Mr. Dolph, with an indulgent little laugh; "and my poor old peruke will
+do very well for to-day."
+
+There was a perceptible diminution in Mr. Huggins's ardor; but he was
+still suave.
+
+"I hope the madam is in good health," he remarked.
+
+"She is, I believe," said Mr. Dolph.
+
+"And your good lady, sir? I have not had the pleasure of treating Mrs.
+Dolph professionally for some time, sir, I----"
+
+Mr. Dolph was wary. "I don't think Mrs. Dolph is fond of the latest
+modes, Huggins. But here comes Mr. Van Riper. Perhaps he will have his
+peruke _frisée_."
+
+Mr. Huggins got out of a dancing-master's pose with intelligent
+alacrity, bade Mr. Dolph a hasty "Good-afternoon!" and hurried off
+toward his shop, one door above Wall Street. Mr. Van Riper did not like
+"John Richard Desbrosses Huggins, Knight of the Comb."
+
+There was something else that Mr. Van Riper did not like.
+
+"Hullo, Dolph!" he hailed his friend. "What's this I heard about you
+building a preposterous tom-fool of a town-house out by Greenwich? Why
+don't you hire that house that Burr had, up near Lispenard's
+cow-pasture, and be done with it?"
+
+Mr. Dolph seized his chance.
+
+"It's not so preposterous as all that. By the way, talking of Burr, I
+hear from Richmond that he'll positively be tried next week. Did you
+know that young Irving--William's son, the youngest, the lad that writes
+squibs--has gone to Richmond for the defence?"
+
+"William Irving's son might be in better business," grunted Mr. Van
+Riper, for a moment diverted. "If we'd got at that devil when he
+murdered poor Hamilton--'fore gad, we'd have saved the trouble of trying
+him. Do you remember when we was for going to Philadelphia after him,
+and there the sly scamp was at home all the time up in his fine house,
+a-sitting in a tub of water, reading French stuff, as cool as a
+cowcumber, with the whole town hunting for him?" Then he came back. "But
+that house of yours. You haven't got this crazy notion that New York's
+going to turn into London while you smoke your pipe, have you? You're
+keeping some of your seven business senses, ain't you?"
+
+"I don't know," Mr. Dolph mildly defended his hobby; "there is a great
+potentiality of growth in this city. Here's an estimate that John
+Pintard made the other day----"
+
+"John Pintard! He's another like _you_!" said Mr. Van Riper.
+
+"Well, look at it for yourself," pleaded the believer in New York's
+future.
+
+Mr. Van Riper took the neatly written paper, and simply snorted and
+gasped as he read this:
+
+                         _Statistical_.
+
+    By the numeration of the inhabitants of this city, recently
+    published, the progress of population for the last 5 years appears
+    to be at the rate of 25 per cent. Should our city continue to
+    increase in the same proportion during the present century, the
+    aggregate number at its close will far exceed that of any other city
+    in the Old World, Pekin not excepted, as will appear from the
+    following table. Progress of population in the city of New York,
+    computed at the rate of 25 per cent, every 5 years:
+
+      1805   75,770        1855    705,650
+      1810   95,715        1860    882,062
+      1815  110,390        1865  1,102,577
+      1820  147,987        1870  1,378,221
+      1825  184,923        1875  1,722,776
+      1830  231,228        1880  2,153,470
+      1835  289,035        1885  2,691,837
+      1840  361,293        1890  3,364,796
+      1845  451,616        1895  4,205,995
+      1850  564,520        1900  5,257,493
+
+When he had read it through he was a-quivering, crimson with that rage
+of Conservative indignation which is even more fervent than the flames
+of Radical enthusiasm.
+
+"Yes," he said; "there's seventy-five thousand people in this town, and
+there'll be seventy-five thousand bankrupts if this lunacy goes on. And
+there's seventy-five thousand maggots in your brain, and seventy-five
+thousand in John Pintard's; and if you two live to see nineteen hundred,
+you'll have twice five million two hundred and fifty-seven thousand four
+hundred and ninety-three--whatever that may be!" And he thrust the paper
+back at Jacob Dolph, and made for the Tontine and the society of
+sensible men.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The house was built, in spite of Abram Van Riper's remonstrance. It had
+a stone front, almost flush with the road, and brick gable-ends, in each
+one of which, high up near the roof, stood an arched window, to lift an
+eyebrow to the sun, morning and evening. But it was only a
+country-house, after all; and the Dolphs set up their carriage and
+drove out and in, from June to September.
+
+There was a garden at the side, where Mrs. Dolph could have the flowers
+her heart had yearned after ever since Jacob Dolph brought her from her
+home at Rondout, when she was seventeen.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Strengthened by the country air--so they said--young Jacob grew clean
+out of his dame-school days and into and out of Columbia College, and
+was sent abroad, a sturdy youth, to have a year's holiday. It was to the
+new house that he came back the next summer, with a wonderful stock of
+fine clothes and of finer manners, and with a pair of mustaches that
+scandalized everybody but Madam Des Anges, who had seen the like in
+France when she visited her brother. And a very fine young buck was
+young Jacob, altogether, with his knowledge of French and his ignorance
+of Dutch, and a way he had with the women, and another way he had with
+the men, and his heirship to old Jacob Dolph's money and his two
+houses.
+
+For they stayed in the old house until 1822.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a close, hot night in the early summer; there was a thick, warm
+mist that turned now and then into a soft rain; yet every window in the
+Dolphs' house on State Street was closed.
+
+It had been a hideous day for New York. From early morning until long
+after dark had set in, the streets had been filled with frightened,
+disordered crowds. The city was again stricken with the old, inevitable,
+ever-recurring scourge of yellow fever, and the people had lost their
+heads. In every house, in every office and shop, there was hasty
+packing, mad confusion, and wild flight. It was only a question of
+getting out of town as best one might. Wagons and carts creaked and
+rumbled and rattled through every street, piled high with household
+chattels, up-heaped in blind haste. Women rode on the swaying loads, or
+walked beside with the smaller children in their arms. Men bore heavy
+burdens, and children helped according to their strength. There was
+only one idea, and that was flight--from a pestilence whose coming
+might have been prevented, and whose course could have been stayed. To
+most of these poor creatures the only haven seemed to be Greenwich
+Village; but some sought the scattered settlements above; some crossed
+to Hoboken; some to Bushwick; while others made a long journey to Staten
+Island, across the bay. And when they reached their goals, it was to beg
+or buy lodgings anywhere and anyhow; to sleep in cellars and garrets, in
+barns and stables.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The panic was not only among the poor and ignorant. Merchants were
+moving their offices, and even the Post Office and the Custom House
+were to be transferred to Greenwich. There were some who remained
+faithful throughout all, and who labored for the stricken, and whose
+names are not even written in the memory of their fellow-men. But the
+city had been so often ravaged before, that at the first sight there was
+one mere animal impulse of flight that seized upon all alike.
+
+At one o'clock, when some of the better streets had once more taken on
+their natural quiet, an ox-cart stood before the door of the Dolphs' old
+house. A little behind it stood the family carriage, its lamps unlit.
+The horses stirred uneasily, but the oxen waited in dull, indifferent
+patience. Presently the door opened, and two men came out and awkwardly
+bore a plain coffin to the cart. Then they mounted to the front of the
+cart, hiding between them a muffled lantern. They wore cloths over the
+lower part of their faces, and felt hats drawn low over their eyes.
+Something in their gait showed them to be seafaring men, or the like.
+
+Then out of the open door came Jacob Dolph, moving with a feeble shuffle
+between his son and his old negro coachman--this man and his wife the
+only faithful of all the servants. The young man put his father in the
+carriage, and the negro went back and locked the doors and brought the
+keys to his young master. He mounted to the box, and through the
+darkness could be seen a white towel tied around his arm--the old badge
+of servitude's mourning.
+
+The oxen were started up, and the two vehicles moved up into Broadway.
+They travelled with painful slowness; the horses had to be held in to
+keep them behind the cart, for the oxen could be only guided by the
+whip, and not by word of mouth. The old man moaned a little at the pace,
+and quivered when he heard the distant sound of hammers.
+
+"What is it?" he asked, nervously.
+
+"They are boarding up some of the streets," said his son; "do not fear,
+father. Everything is prepared; and if we make no noise, we shall not be
+troubled."
+
+"If we can only keep her out of the Potter's Field--the Potter's Field!"
+cried the father; "I'll thank God--I'll ask no more--I'll ask no more!"
+
+And then he broke down and cried a little, feebly, and got his son's
+hand in the darkness and put on his own shoulder.
+
+It was nearly two when they came to St. Paul's and turned the corner to
+the gate. It was dark below, but some frenzied fools were burning
+tar-barrels far down Ann Street, and the light flickered on the top of
+the church spire. They crossed the churchyard to where a shallow grave
+had been dug, half way down the hill. The men lowered the body into it;
+the old negro gave them a little _rouleau_ of coin, and they went
+hurriedly away into the night.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The clergyman came out by and by, with the sexton behind him. He stood
+high up above the grave, and drew his long cloak about him and lifted an
+old pomander-box to his face. He was not more foolish than his fellows;
+in that evil hour men took to charms and to saying of spells. Below the
+grave and apart, for the curse rested upon them, too, stood Jacob Dolph
+and his son, the old man leaning on the arm of the younger. Then the
+clergyman began to read the service for the burial of the dead, over
+the departed sister--and wife and mother. He spoke low; but his voice
+seemed to echo in the stillness. He came forward with a certain
+shrinking, and cast the handful of dust and ashes into the grave. When
+it was done, the sexton stepped forward and rapidly threw in the earth
+until he had filled the little hollow even with the ground. Then, with
+fearful precaution, he laid down the carefully cut sods, and smoothed
+them until there was no sign of what had been done. The clergyman turned
+to the two mourners, without moving nearer to them, and lifted up his
+hands. The old man tried to kneel; but his son held him up, for he was
+too feeble, and they bent their heads for a moment of silence. The
+clergyman went away as he had come; and Jacob Dolph and his son went
+back to the carriage. When his father was seated, young Jacob Dolph said
+to the coachman: "To the new house."
+
+The heavy coach swung into Broadway, and climbed up the hill out into
+the open country. There were lights still burning in the farmhouses,
+bright gleams to east and west, but the silence of the damp summer night
+hung over the sparse suburbs, and the darkness seemed to grow more
+intense as they drove away from the city. The trees by the roadside were
+almost black in the gray mist; the raw, moist smell of the night, the
+damp air, chilly upon the high land, came in through the carriage
+windows. Young Jacob looked out and noted their progress by familiar
+landmarks on the road; but the old man sat with his head bent on his new
+black stock.
+
+It was almost three, and the east was beginning to look dark, as though
+a storm were settling there in the grayness, when they turned down the
+straggling street and drew up before the great dark mass that was the
+new house. The carriage-wheels gritted against the loose stones at the
+edge of the roadway, and the great door of the house swung open. The
+light of one wavering candle-flame, held high above her head, fell on
+the black face of old Chloe, the coachman's wife. There were no candles
+burning on the high-pitched stairway; all was dark behind her in the
+empty house.
+
+Young Jacob Dolph helped his father to the ground, and between the young
+man and the negro old Jacob Dolph wearily climbed the steps. Chloe
+lifted her apron to her face, and turned to lead them up the stair. Her
+husband went out to his horses, shutting the door softly after him,
+between Jacob Dolph's old life and the new life that was to begin in the
+new house.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+When young Jacob Dolph came down to breakfast the next morning he found
+his father waiting for him in the breakfast-room. The meal was upon the
+table. Old Chloe stood with her black hands folded upon her white apron,
+and her pathetic negro eyes following the old gentleman as he moved
+wistfully about the room.
+
+Father and son shook hands in silence, and turned to the table. There
+were three chairs in their accustomed places. They hesitated a
+half-second, looking at the third great arm-chair, as though they waited
+for the mistress of the house to take her place. Then they sat down. It
+was six years before any one took that third chair, but every morning
+Jacob Dolph the elder made that little pause before he put himself at
+the foot of the table.
+
+On this first morning there was very little said and very little eaten.
+But when they had made an end of sitting at the table old Jacob Dolph
+said, with something almost like testiness in his husky voice:
+
+"Jacob, I want to sell the house."
+
+"Father!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"The old house, I mean; I shall never go back there."
+
+His son looked at him with a further inquiry. He felt a sudden new
+apprehension. The father sat back in his easy-chair, drumming on the
+arms with nervous fingers.
+
+"I shall never go back there," he said again.
+
+"Of course you know best, sir," said young Jacob, gently; "but would it
+be well to be precipitate? It is possible that you may feel differently
+some time----"
+
+"There is no 'some time' for me!" broke in the old man, gripping the
+chair-arms, fiercely; "my time's done--done, sir!"
+
+Then his voice broke and became plaintively kind.
+
+"There, there! Forgive me, Jacob, boy. But it's true, my boy, true. The
+world's done, for me; but there's a world ahead for you, my son, thank
+God! I'll be patient--I'll be patient. God has been good to me, and I
+haven't many years to wait, in the course of nature."
+
+He looked vacantly out of the window, trying to see the unforeseen with
+his mental sight.
+
+"While I'm here, Jacob, let the old man have his way. It's a whimsey; I
+doubt 'tis hardly rational. But I have no heart to go home. Let me learn
+to live my life here. 'Twill be easier."
+
+"But do you think it necessary to sell, sir? Could you not hold the
+house? Are you certain that you would like to have a stranger living
+there?"
+
+"I care not a pin who lives within those four walls now, sir!" cried the
+elder, with a momentary return of his vehemence. "It's no house to me
+now. Sell it, sir, sell it!--if there's any one will give money for it
+at a time like this. Bring every stick of furniture and every stitch of
+carpet up here; and let me have my way, Jacob--it won't be for long."
+
+He got up and went blindly out of the room, and his son heard him
+muttering, "Not for long--not for long, now," as he wandered about the
+house and went aimlessly into room after room.
+
+Old Jacob Dolph had always been an indulgent parent, and none kinder
+ever lived. But we should hardly call him indulgent to-day. Good as he
+was to his boy, it had always been with the goodness of a superior. It
+was the way of his time. A half-century ago the child's position was
+equivocal. He lived by the grace of God and his parents, and their duty
+to him was rather a duty to society, born of an abstract morality. Love
+was given him, not as a right, but as an indulgence. And young Jacob
+Dolph, in all his grief and anxiety, was guiltily conscious of a secret
+thrill of pleasure--natural enough, poor boy!--in his sudden elevation
+to the full dignity of manhood, and his father's abdication of the
+headship of the house.
+
+A little later in the day, urged again by the old gentleman, he put on
+his hat and went to see Abram Van Riper. Mr. Van Riper was now, despite
+his objections to the pernicious institution of country-houses, a near
+neighbor of the Dolphs. He had yielded, not to fashion, but to yellow
+fever, and at the very first of the outbreak had bought a house on the
+outskirts of Greenwich Village, and had moved there in unseemly haste.
+He had also registered an unnecessarily profane oath that he would never
+again live within the city limits.
+
+When young Jacob Dolph came in front of the low, hip-roofed house, whose
+lower story of undressed stone shone with fresh whitewash, Mr. Van Riper
+stood on his stoop and checked his guest at the front gate, a dozen
+yards away. From this distance he jabbed his big gold-headed cane toward
+the young man, as though to keep him off.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Stay there, sir--you, sir, you Jacob Dolph!" he roared, brandishing the
+big stick. "Stand back, I tell you! Don't come in, sir! Good-day,
+sir--good-day, good-day, good-day!" (This hurried excursus was in
+deference to a sense of social duty.) "Keep away, confound you, keep
+away--consume your body, sir, stay where you are!"
+
+"I'm not coming any nearer, Mr. Van Riper," said Jacob Dolph, with a
+smile which he could not help.
+
+"I can't have you in here, sir," went on Mr. Van Riper, with no
+abatement of his agitation. "I don't want to be inhospitable; but I've
+got a wife and a son, sir, and you're infectious--damn it, sir, you're
+infectious!"
+
+"I'll stay where I am, Mr. Van Riper," said young Jacob, smiling again.
+"I only came with a message from my father."
+
+"With a what?" screamed Mr. Van Riper. "I can't have--oh, ay, a message!
+Well, say it then and be off, like a sensible youngster. Consume it,
+man, can't you talk farther out in the street?"
+
+When Mr. Van Riper learned his visitor's message, he flung his stick on
+the white pebbles of the clam-shell-bordered path, and swore that he,
+Van Riper, was the only sane man in a city of lunatics, and that if
+Jacob Dolph tried to carry out his plan he should be shipped
+straightway to Bloomingdale.
+
+But young Jacob had something of his father's patience, and, despite the
+publicity of the interview, he contrived to make Mr. Van Riper
+understand how matters stood. To tell the truth, Van Riper grew quite
+sober and manageable when he realized that his extravagant imputation of
+insanity was not so wide of the mark as it might have seemed, and that
+there was a possibility that his old friend's mind might be growing
+weak. He even ventured a little way down the path and permitted Jacob to
+come to the gate while they discussed the situation.
+
+"Poor old Dolph--poor old Jacob!" he groaned. "We must keep him out of
+the hands of the sharks, that we must!" He did not see young Jacob's
+irrepressible smile at this singular extension of metaphor. "He mustn't
+be allowed to sell that house in open market--never, sir! Confound it,
+I'll buy it myself before I'll see him fleeced!"
+
+In the end he agreed, on certain strict conditions of precaution, to see
+young Jacob the next day and discuss ways and means to save the
+property.
+
+"Come here, sir, at ten, and I'll see you in the sitting-room, and we'll
+find out what we can do for your father--curse it, it makes me feel bad;
+by gad, it does! Ten to-morrow, then--and come fumigated, young man,
+don't you forget that--come fumigated, sir!"
+
+It was Van Riper who bought the property at last. He paid eighteen
+thousand dollars for it. This was much less than its value; but it was
+more than any one else would have given just at that time, and it was
+all that Van Riper could afford. The transaction weighed on the
+purchaser's mind, however. He had bought the house solely out of
+kindness, at some momentary inconvenience to himself; and yet it looked
+as though he were taking advantage of his friend's weakness. Abram Van
+Riper was a man who cultivated a clear conscience, of a plain,
+old-fashioned sort, and the necessity for self-examination was novel and
+disagreeable to him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Life lived itself out at Jacob Dolph's new house whether he liked it or
+not. The furniture came up-town, and was somewhat awkwardly disposed
+about its new quarters; and in this unhomelike combination of two homes
+old Mr. Dolph sat himself down to finish his stint of life. He awoke
+each morning and found that twenty-four hours of sleep and waking lay
+before him, to be got through in their regular order, just as they were
+lived through by men who had an interest in living. He went to bed every
+night, and crossed off one from a tale of days of which he could not
+know the length.
+
+Of course his son, in some measure, saved his existence from emptiness.
+He was proud of young Jacob--fond and proud. He looked upon him as a
+prince of men, which he was, indeed. He trusted absolutely in the young
+man, and his trust was well placed. And he knew that his boy loved him.
+But he had an old man's sad consciousness that he was not necessary to
+Jacob--that he was an adjunct, at the best, not an integral part of this
+younger existence. He saw Jacob the younger gradually recovering from
+his grief for the mother who had left them; and he knew that even so
+would Jacob some day recover from grief when his father should have
+gone.
+
+He saw this; but it is doubtful if he felt it acutely. Nature was
+gradually dulling his sensibilities with that wonderful anæsthetic of
+hers, which is so much kinder to the patient than it is to his watching
+friends. After the first wild freak of selling the house, he showed, for
+a long time, no marked signs of mental impairment, beyond his lack of
+interest in the things which he had once cared about--even in the growth
+of the city he loved. And in a lonely and unoccupied man, sixty-five
+years of age, this was not unnatural. It was not unnatural, even, if now
+and then he was whimsical, and took odd fancies and prejudices. But
+nevertheless the work was going on within his brain, little by little,
+day by day.
+
+He settled his life into an almost mechanical routine, of which the most
+active part was his daily walk down into the city. At first he would not
+go beyond St. Paul's churchyard; but after awhile he began to take
+timorous strolls among the old business streets where his life had been
+passed. He would drop into the offices of his old friends, and would
+read the market reports with a pretence of great interest, and then he
+would fold up his spectacles and put them in their worn leather case,
+and walk slowly out. He was always pleased when one of the younger
+clerks bowed to him and said, "Good-day, Mr. Dolph!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+It was in the fourth year of his widowhood that he bethought himself of
+young Jacob's need of a more liberal social life than he had been
+leading. The boy went about enough; he was a good deal of a beau, so
+his father heard; and there was no desirable house in the town that did
+not welcome handsome, amiable young Dolph. But he showed no signs of
+taking a wife unto himself, and in those days the bachelor had only a
+provisional status in society. He was expected to wed, and the whole
+circle of his friends chorused yearly a deeper regret for the lost
+sheep, as time made that detestable thing, an "old bachelor," of him.
+
+Young Jacob was receiving many courtesies and was making no adequate
+return. He felt it himself, but he was too tender of his father's
+changeless grief to urge him to open the great empty house to their
+friends. The father, however, felt that it was his duty to sacrifice his
+own desire for solitude, and, when the winter of 1825 brought home the
+city's wandering children--there were not so many of the wandering sort
+in 1825--he insisted that young Jacob should give a dinner to his
+friends among the gay young bachelors. That would be a beginning; and if
+all went well they would have an old maiden aunt from Philadelphia to
+spend the winter with them, and help them to give the dinner parties
+which do not encourage bachelorhood, but rather convert and reform the
+coy celibate.
+
+The news went rapidly through the town. The Dolph hospitality had been
+famous, and this was taken for a signal that the Dolph doors were to
+open again. There was great excitement in Hudson Street and St. John's
+Park. Maidens, bending over their tambour-frames, working secret hopes
+and aspirations in with their blossoming silks and worsted, blushed,
+with faint speculative smiles, as they thought of the vast social
+possibilities of the mistress of the grand Dolph house. Young bachelors,
+and old bachelors, too, rolled memories of the Dolph Madeira over
+longing tongues.
+
+The Dolph cellar, too, had been famous, and just at that period New
+Yorkers had a fine and fanciful taste in wine, if they had any
+self-respect whatever.
+
+I think it must have been about then that Mr. Dominick Lynch began his
+missionary labors among the smokers and drinkers of this city; he who
+bought a vineyard in France and the Vuelta Abajo plantations in Cuba,
+solely to teach the people of his beloved New York what was the
+positively proper thing in wines and cigars. If it was not then, it
+could not have been much later that Mr. Dolph had got accustomed to
+receiving, every now and then, an unordered and unexpected consignment
+of wines or Havana cigars, sent up from Little Dock Street--or what we
+call Water Street now, the lower end of it. And I am sure that he paid
+Mr. Lynch's bill with glowing pride; for Mr. Lynch extended the
+evangelizing hand of culture to none but those of pre-eminent social
+position.
+
+It was to be quite a large dinner; but it was noticeable that none of
+the young men who were invited had engagements of regrettable priority.
+
+Jacob Dolph the elder looked more interested in life than he had looked
+in four years when he stood on the hearthrug in the drawing-room and
+received his son's guests. He was a bold figure among all the young men,
+not only because he was tall and white-haired, and for the moment
+erect, and of a noble and gracious cast of countenance, but because he
+clung to his old style of dress--his knee-breeches and silk stockings,
+and his long coat, black, for this great occasion, but of the
+"shadbelly" pattern. He wore his high black stock, too, and his
+snow-white hair was gathered behind into a loose peruke.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The young men wore trousers, or pantaloons, as they mostly called them,
+strapped under their varnished boots. Their coats were cut like our
+dress-coats, if you can fancy them with a wild amplitude of collar and
+lapel. They wore large cravats and gaudy waistcoats, and two or three of
+them who had been too much in England came with shawls or rugs around
+their shoulders.
+
+They were a fashionable lot of people, and this was a late dinner, so
+they sat down at six o'clock in the great dining-room--not the little
+breakfast-room--with old Jacob Dolph at one end of the table and young
+Jacob Dolph at the other.
+
+It was a pleasant dinner, and the wine was good, and the company duly
+appreciative, although individually critical.
+
+Old Jacob Dolph had on his right an agreeable French count, just arrived
+in New York, who was creating a _furor_; and on his left was Mr. Philip
+Waters, the oldest of the young men, who, being thirty-five, had a
+certain consideration for old age. But old Jacob Dolph was not quite at
+his ease. He did not understand the remarkable decorum of the young men.
+He himself belonged to the age of "bumpers and no heel taps," and nobody
+at his board to-night seemed to care about drinking bumpers, even out
+of the poor, little, newfangled claret-glasses, that held only a
+thimbleful apiece. He had never known a lot of gentlemen, all by
+themselves, to be so discreet. Before the evening was over he became
+aware of the fact that he was the only man who was proposing toasts, and
+then he proposed them no more.
+
+Things had changed since he was a young buck, and gave bachelor parties.
+Why, he could remember seeing his own good father--an irreproachable
+gentleman, surely--lock the door of his dining-room on the inside--ay,
+at just such a dinner as this--and swear that no guest of his should go
+out of that room sober. And his word had been kept. Times were changing.
+He thought, somehow, that these young men needed more good port in their
+veins.
+
+Toward the end of the festivities he grew silent. He gave no more
+toasts, and drank no more bumpers, although he might safely have put
+another bottle or two under his broad waistcoat. But he leaned back in
+his chair, and rested one hand on the table, playing with his wineglass
+in an absent-minded way. There was a vague smile on his face; but every
+now and then he knit his heavy gray brows as if he were trying to work
+out some problem of memory. Mr. Philip Waters and the French count were
+talking across him; he had been in the conversation, but he had dropped
+out some time before. At last he rose, with his brows knit, and pulled
+out his huge watch, and looked at its face. Everybody turned toward him,
+and, at the other end of the table, his son half rose to his feet. He
+put the watch back in his pocket, and said, in his clear, deep voice:
+"Gentlemen, I think we will rejoin the ladies."
+
+There was a little impulsive stir around the table, and then he seemed
+to understand that he had wandered, and a frightened look came over his
+face. He tottered backward, and swayed from side to side. Mr. Philip
+Waters and the Frenchman had their arms behind him before he could fall,
+and in a second or two he had straightened himself up. He made a
+stately, tremulous apology for what he called his "infelicitous
+absence of mind," and then he marched off to bed by himself, suffering
+no one to go with him.
+
+[Illustration: And then he marched off to bed by himself, suffering no
+one to go with him.]
+
+A little while later in the evening, Mr. Philip Waters, walking down
+Broadway (which thoroughfare was getting to have a fairly suburban
+look), informed the French count that in his, Mr. Waters's, opinion,
+young Jacob Dolph would own that house before long.
+
+Young Jacob Dolph's father insisted on repetitions of the bachelor
+dinner, but he never again appeared in the great dining-room. When there
+was a stag party he took his own simple dinner at five o'clock and went
+to bed early, and lay awake until his son had dismissed the last mild
+reveller, and he could hear the light, firm, young footstep mounting the
+stairs to the bedroom door opposite his own.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That was practically the end of it for old Jacob Dolph. The maiden aunt,
+who had been invited, was notified that she could not come, for Mr.
+Dolph was not well enough to open his house that winter. But it was
+delicately intimated to her that if he grew worse she might still be
+sent for, and that alleviated her natural disappointment. She liked to
+give parties; but there is also a chastened joy for some people in being
+at the head of a house of mourning.
+
+Old Mr. Dolph grew no worse physically, except that he was inclined to
+make his daily walks shorter, and that he grew fonder of sitting at home
+in the little breakfast-room, where the sun shone almost all day long,
+and where Mrs. Dolph had once been fond of coming to sew. Her little
+square work-table of mahogany stood there still. There the old gentleman
+liked to dine, and often he dined alone. Young Jacob was in great demand
+all over town, and his father knew that he ought to go out and amuse
+himself. And the young man, although he was kind and loving, and never
+negligent in any office of respect or affection, had that strong youth
+in him which makes it impossible to sit every day of the week opposite
+an old man whose world had slipped by him, who knew nothing of youth
+except to love it and wonder at it.
+
+In the morning, before he went out for his daily tramp into town, old
+Jacob would say to young Jacob:
+
+"I suppose I shall see you at dinner, my boy?"
+
+And young Jacob would say, "Yes, sir," or "No, sir, I think not. Mrs.
+Des Anges was in town yesterday, and she asked me to ride up there
+to-day and dine. And Diana" (Diana was his big black mare) "needs a
+little work; she's getting badly out of condition. So, if it doesn't
+matter to you, sir, I'll just run up there and get back before the moon
+sets."
+
+And the father would answer that it didn't matter, and would send his
+best respects, through Mrs. Des Anges at King's Bridge, to Madam Des
+Anges at New Rochelle; and at night he would sit down alone to his
+dinner in the breakfast-room, served by old Chloe, who did her humble
+best to tempt his appetite, which was likely to be feeble when Master
+Jacob was away.
+
+Master Jacob had taken to riding to King's Bridge of late. Sometimes he
+would start out early in the morning, just about the time when young
+Van Riper was plodding by on his way to the shop. Young Van Riper liked
+to be at the shop an hour earlier than his father. Old Mr. Dolph was
+always up, on these occasions, to see his son start off. He loved to
+look at the boy, in his English riding-boots and breeches, astride of
+black Diana, who pranced and curvetted up the unpaved road. Young Jacob
+had her well in hand, but he gave her her head and let her play until
+they reached Broadway, where he made her strike a rattling regular pace
+until they got well up the road; and then she might walk up Bloomingdale
+way or across to Hickory Lane.
+
+If he went up by the east he was likely to dismount at a place which you
+can see now, a little west and south of McComb's Dam Bridge, where there
+is a bit of a rocky hollow, and a sort of horizontal cleft in the rocks
+that has been called a cave, and a water-washed stone above, whose oddly
+shaped depression is called an Indian's footprint. He would stop there,
+because right in that hollow, as I can tell you myself, grew, in his
+time as in mine, the first of the spring flowers. It was full of violets
+once, carpeted fairly with the pale, delicate petals.
+
+And up toward the west, on a bridle-path between the hills and the
+river, as you came toward Fort Washington, going to Tubby Hook--we are
+refined nowadays, and Tubby Hook is "Inwood"--Heaven help it!--there
+were wonderful flowers in the woods. The wind-flowers came there early,
+nestling under the gray rocks that sparkled with garnets; and there
+bloomed great bunches of Dutchman's-breeches--not the thin sprays that
+come in the late New England spring, but huge clumps that two men could
+not enclose with linked hands; great masses of scarlet and purple,
+and--mostly--of a waxy white, with something deathlike in their
+translucent beauty. There, also, he would wade into the swamps around a
+certain little creek, lured by a hope of the jack-in-the-pulpit, to find
+only the odorous and disappointing skunk-cabbage. And there the woods
+were full of the aroma of sassafras, and of birch tapped by the earliest
+woodpecker, whose drumming throbbed through the young man's deep and
+tender musing.
+
+And--strange enough for a young man who rides only to exercise his black
+mare--he never came out of those woods without an armful of columbine or
+the like. And--strange enough for any young man in this world of strange
+things--when he sat down at the table of Mrs. Des Anges, in her pleasant
+house near Harlem Creek, Miss Aline Des Anges wore a bunch of those
+columbines at her throat. Miss Aline Des Anges was a slim girl, not very
+tall, with great dark eyes that followed some people with a patient
+wistfulness.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One afternoon, in May of 1827, young Jacob found his father in the
+breakfast-room, and said to him:
+
+"Father, I am going to marry Aline Des Anges."
+
+His father, who had been dozing in the sun by the south window, raised
+his eyes to his son's face with a kindly, blank look, and said,
+thoughtfully:
+
+"Des Anges. That's a good family, Jacob, and a wonderful woman, Madam
+Des Anges. Is she alive yet?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Madam Des Anges, eighty years old, and strong and well, heard of
+this, she said:
+
+"It is the etiquette of France that one family should make the
+proposition to the other family. Under the circumstances _I_ will be the
+family that proposes. I will make a precedent. The Des Anges make
+precedents."
+
+And she rode down to the Dolph house in the family carriage--the last
+time it ever went out--and made her "proposition" to Jacob Dolph the
+elder, and he brightened up most wonderfully, until you would have
+thought him quite his old self, and he told her what an honor he
+esteemed the alliance, and paid her compliments a hundred words long.
+
+And in May of the next year, King's Bridge being out of the question,
+and etiquette being waived at the universal demand of society, the young
+couple stood up in the drawing-room of the Dolph house to be wed.
+
+The ceremony was fashionably late--seven o'clock in the evening. And
+after it was over, and the young couple had digested what St. Paul had
+to say about the ordinance of wedlock, and had inaudibly promised to do
+and be whatever the domine required of them, they were led by the
+half-dozen groomsmen to the long glass between the front windows, and
+made to stand up there, with their faces toward the company, and to
+receive the congratulations of a mighty procession of friends, who all
+used the same formulas, except the very old ones, who were delicately
+indelicate.
+
+The bridegroom wore a blue coat and trousers, and a white satin
+waistcoat embroidered with silver-thread roses and lilies-of-the-valley.
+The coat was lined with cream-colored satin, quilted in a most elaborate
+pattern; and his necktie was of satin, too, with embroidered ends. His
+shirt was a miracle of fine linen. As to the bride, she was in white
+satin and lace, and at her throat she wore a little bunch of late white
+columbines, for which Mr. Jacob Dolph the younger had scoured the woods
+near Fort Washington.
+
+There was to be a grand supper, later; and the time of waiting was
+filled up with fashionable conversation.
+
+That dear old doctor, who was then a dear young doctor, and whose fine
+snow-crowned face stood in later years as an outward and visible sign of
+all that was brave, kindly, self-sacrificing, and benevolent in the art
+of healing, was seated by Madam Des Anges, and was telling her, in
+stately phrase, suited to his auditor, of a certain case of heroism with
+which he had met in the course of his practice. Mr. Blank, it appeared,
+had been bitten by a dog that was supposed to be possessed by the
+rabies. For months he had suffered the agonies of mental suspense and of
+repeated cauterizing of the flesh, and during those months had concealed
+his case from his wife, that he might spare her pain--suffering in
+silence enough to unnerve most men.
+
+"It was heroic," said Dr. F.
+
+Madam Des Anges bowed her gray head approvingly.
+
+"I think," she said, "his conduct shows him to be a man of taste. Had he
+informed his wife of his condition, she might have experienced the most
+annoying solicitude; and I am informed that she is a person of feeble
+character."
+
+The doctor looked at her, and then down at the floor; and then he asked
+her if she did not hope that Almaviva Lynch would bring Garcia back
+again, with that marvellous Italian opera, which, as he justly observed,
+captivated the eye, charmed the ear, and awakened the profoundest
+emotions of the heart.
+
+And at that Madam Des Anges showed some animation, and responded that
+she had listened to some pleasing operas in Paris; but she did not know
+that they were of Italian origin.
+
+But if Madam Des Anges was surprised to learn that any good thing could
+come out of any other country than France, there was another surprise in
+store for her, and it did not long impend.
+
+It was only a little while after this that her grandson-in-law, finding
+her on his right and Abram Van Riper on his left--he had served out his
+time as a statue in front of the mirror--thought it proper to introduce
+to Madam Des Anges his father's old friend, Mr. Van Riper. Mr. Van
+Riper bowed as low as his waistcoat would allow, and courteously
+observed that the honor then accorded him he had enjoyed earlier in the
+evening through the kind offices of Mr. Jacob Dolph, senior.
+
+Madam Des Anges dandled her quizzing-glass as though she meant to put it
+up to her eye, and said, in a weary way:
+
+"Mr.--ah--Van Riper must pardon me. I have not the power of remembering
+faces that some people appear to have; and my eyes--my eyes are not
+strong."
+
+Old Van Riper stared at her, and he turned a turkey-cock purple all over
+his face, down to the double chin that hung over his white neckerchief.
+
+"If your ladyship has to buy spectacles," he sputtered, "it needn't be
+on my account."
+
+And he stamped off to the sideboard and tried to cool his red-hot rage
+with potations of Jamaica rum. There his wife found him. She had drawn
+near when she saw him talking with the great Madam Des Anges, and she
+had heard, as she stood hard by and smiled unobtrusively, the end of
+that brief conversation. Her face, too, was flushed--a more fiery red
+than her flame-colored satin dress.
+
+She attacked him in a vehement whisper.
+
+"Van Riper, what are you doing? I'd almost believe you'd had too much
+liquor, if I didn't know you hadn't had a drop. Will you ever learn what
+gentility is? D'ye want us to live and die like toads in a hole? Here
+you are with your ill manners, offending Madam Des Anges, that everybody
+knows is the best of the best, and there's an end of all likelihood of
+ever seeing her and her folks, and two nieces unmarried and as good
+girls as ever was, and such a connection for your son, who hasn't been
+out of the house it's now twelve months--except to this very wedding
+here, and you've no thought of your family when once you lose that
+mighty fine temper of yours, that you're so prodigious proud of; and
+where you'll end us, Van Riper, is more than I know, I vow."
+
+But all she could get out of Van Riper was:
+
+"The old harridan! She'll remember my name this year or two to come,
+I'll warrant ye!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was all over at last, and old black Julius, who had been acting as a
+combination of link-boy and major-domo at the foot of the front steps,
+extinguished his lantern, and went to bed, some time before a little
+white figure stole up the stairs and slipped into a door that
+Chloe--black Chloe--held open.
+
+And the next day Jacob Dolph the elder handed the young bride into the
+new travelling-carriage with his stateliest grace, and Mr. and Mrs.
+Jacob Dolph, junior, rolled proudly up the road, through Bloomingdale,
+and across King's Bridge--stopping for luncheon at the Des Anges
+house--over to New Rochelle, where the feminine head of the house of Des
+Anges received them at her broad front door, and where they had the
+largest room in her large, old-fashioned house, for one night. Madam Des
+Anges wished to keep them longer, and was authoritative about it. But
+young Jacob settled the question of supremacy then and there, with the
+utmost courtesy, and Madam Des Anges, being great enough to know that
+she was beaten, sent off the victor on the morrow, with his trembling
+accomplice by his side, and wished them _bon voyage_ as heartily as she
+possibly could.
+
+So they started afresh on their bridal tour, and very soon the
+travelling carriage struck the old Queen Anne's Road, and reached
+Yonkers. And there, and from there up to Fishkill, they passed from one
+country-house to another, bright particular stars at this dinner and at
+that supper, staying a day here and a night there, and having just the
+sort of sociable, public, restless, rattling good time that neither of
+them wanted.
+
+At every country-house where they stayed a day they were pressed to stay
+a week, and always the whole neighborhood was routed out to pay them
+social tribute. The neighbors came in by all manner of conveyances. One
+family of aristocrats started at six o'clock in the morning, and
+travelled fourteen miles down the river in an ox-cart, the ladies
+sitting bolt upright, with their hair elaborately dressed for the
+evening's entertainment. And once a regular assembly ball was given in
+their honor, at a town-hall, the use of which was granted for the
+purpose specified by unanimous vote of the town council. Of course,
+they had a very good time; but then there are various sorts of good
+times. Perhaps they might have selected another sort for themselves.
+
+There is a story that, on their way back, they put up for several days
+at a poor little hostelry under the hills below Peekskill, and spent
+their time in wandering through the woods and picking wild-flowers; but
+it lacks confirmation, and I should be sorry to believe that two
+well-brought-up young people would prefer their own society to the
+unlimited hospitality of their friends in the country.
+
+Old Jacob Dolph, at home, had the great house all to himself; and,
+although black Chloe took excellent care of his material comforts, he
+was restless and troubled. He took most pleasure in a London almanac, on
+whose smudgy pages he checked off the days. Letters came as often as the
+steamboat arrived from Albany, and he read them, after his fashion. It
+took him half the week to get through one missive, and by that time
+another had arrived. But I fear he did not make much out of them.
+Still, they gave him one pleasure. He endorsed them carefully with the
+name of the writer, and the date of receipt, and then he laid them away
+in his desk, as neatly as he had filed his business letters in his old
+days of active life.
+
+Every night he had a candle alight in the hallway; and if there were a
+far-off rumble of carriage-wheels late at night, he would rise from his
+bed--he was a light sleeper, in his age--and steal out into the
+corridor, hugging his dressing-robe about him, to peer anxiously down
+over the balusters till the last sound and the last faint hope of his
+son's return had died away.
+
+And, indeed, it was late in July when the travelling-carriage once more
+drew up in front of the Dolph house, and old Julius opened the door, and
+old Mr. Dolph welcomed them, and told them that he had been very lonely
+in their absence, and that their mother--and then he remembered that
+their mother was dead, and went into the house with his head bowed low.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+St. John's Park and Hudson Street and all well-bred New York, for that
+matter, had its fill of the Dolph hospitality the next winter. It was
+dinner and ball and rout and merry-making of one sort or another, the
+season through. The great family sleighs and the little bachelor sleighs
+whirred and jingled up to the Dolph door surely two, and sometimes four,
+evenings in every week, and whirred and jingled away again at intensely
+fashionable hours, such as plain folk used for sleeping.
+
+They woke up Abram Van Riper, did the revellers northward bound to
+country houses on the river-side, and, lying deep in his feather-bed, he
+directed his rumbling imprecations at the panes of glass, that sparkled
+with frost in the mild moonlight.
+
+  "Oh, come, maidens, come, o'er the blue, rolling wave,
+   The lovely should still be the care of the brave--
+   Trancadillo, trancadillo, trancadillo, dillo, dillo, dillo!"
+
+sang the misguided slaves of fashion, as they sped out of hearing.
+
+"Trancadillo!" rumbled Mr. Van Riper. "I'd like to trancadillo them,
+consume 'em!" and then he cursed his old friend's social circle for a
+parcel of trumpery fools; and Mrs. Van Riper, lying by his side, sighed
+softly with chastened regret and hopeless aspiration.
+
+But everybody else--everybody who was anybody--blessed the Dolphs and
+the Dolphs' cellar, and their man-servant and their maid-servant, and
+their roasted ox and their saddle of venison, and the distinguished
+stranger who was within their gates; and young Mrs. Dolph was made as
+welcome as she made others.
+
+For the little girl with the great dark eyes took to all this giddiness
+as naturally as possible--after her quiet fashion. The dark eyes
+sparkled with subdued pleasure that had no mean pride in it when she sat
+at the head of her great mahogany table, and smiled at the double row of
+bright faces that hemmed in the gorgeous display of the Dolph silver and
+china and fine linen. And it was wonderful how charming were the famous
+Des Anges manners, when they were softened and sweetened by so much
+grace and beauty.
+
+"Who would have thought she had it in her?" said the young ladies down
+in St. John's Park. "You remember her, don't you, what a shy little slip
+of a thing she was when we were at old Dumesnil's together? Who was it
+used to say that she had had the life grandmothered out of her?"
+
+"Fine little creature, that wife of Dolph's," said the young men as they
+strolled about in Niblo's Garden. "Dolph wouldn't have had the road all
+to himself if that old dragon of a grandmother had given the girl half a
+chance. 'Gad, she's an old grenadier! They say that Dolph had to put her
+through her facings the day after he was married, and that he did it in
+uncommon fine style, too."
+
+"He's a lucky devil, that Dolph," the younger ones would sigh. "Nothing
+to do, all the money he wants, pretty wife, and the best wine in New
+York! I wish _my_ old man would cut the shop and try to get an education
+in wine."
+
+Their devotion to the frivolities of fashion notwithstanding, the young
+Dolphs were a loving, and, in a way, a domestic couple. Of course,
+everybody they knew had to give them a dinner or a ball, or pay them
+some such social tribute, and there were a myriad calls to be received
+and returned; but they found time for retired communings, even for long
+drives in the sleigh which, many a time in young Jacob Dolph's bachelor
+days, had borne the young man and a female companion--not always the
+same companion, either--up the Bloomingdale Road. And in the confidences
+of those early days young Jacob learned what his gentle little wife told
+him--without herself realizing the pathos of it--the story of her
+crushed, unchildlike youth, loveless till he came, her prince, her
+deliverer. Dolph understood it; he had known, of course, that she could
+not have been happy under the _régime_ of Madam Des Anges; but when he
+heard the simple tale in all its monotonous detail, and saw spread out
+before him this poor young life, with its thousand little
+disappointments, submissions, abnegations, and undeserved punishments
+and needless restrictions, a generous rage glowed in his heart, and
+perhaps sprang once in a while to his indiscreet lips; and out of this
+grew a deeper and maturer tenderness than his honeymoon love for the
+sweet little soul that he had at first sought only for the dark eyes
+through which it looked out upon its joyless world.
+
+It is unwise to speak in profane language, it is injudicious to speak
+disrespectfully of old age, yet the Recording Angel, if he did not see
+fit to let a tear fall upon the page, perchance found it convenient to
+be mending his pen when young Jacob Dolph once uttered certain words
+that made his wife cry out:
+
+"Oh, Jacob, don't, _please_ don't. She didn't mean it!"
+
+This is only a supposition. Perhaps Madam Des Anges really had meant
+well. But oh, how much happier this world would be if all the people who
+"mean well" and do ill would only take to meaning ill and doing well!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jacob Dolph the elder took but a doubtful part in all the festivities.
+The cloud that had hung dimly over him had begun to show little rifts;
+but the dark masses between the rifts were thicker and heavier than
+ever. It was the last brief convulsive struggle of the patient against
+the power of the anæsthetic, when the nervous hand goes up to put the
+cloth away from the mouth, just before the work is done and
+consciousness slips utterly away, and life is no more for the sufferer,
+though his heart beat and the breath be warm between his lips.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+When he was bright he was almost like his old self, and these delusive
+periods came oftenest when he met some old friend, or in quiet morning
+hours when his daughter--so he always called her--sat at his feet in the
+sunny breakfast-room, and sewed and listened, or perhaps read to him
+from Scott's latest novel.
+
+He may have had some faint sub-consciousness of his condition, for
+although he took the deepest interest in the balls and the dinners, he
+would never appear before his son's guests except when he was at his
+best and brightest. But he loved to sit, withdrawn in a corner, watching
+the young life that fluttered through the great rooms, smiling to
+himself, and gently pleased if some old crony sought him out and talked
+of old times--the older the times were, the better he remembered them.
+Indeed, he now recalled some things that he had not thought of since his
+far-off boyhood.
+
+In truth, the younger Dolphs often had small heart in their festal
+doings. But the medical science of the day, positive, self-satisfied,
+and blinded by all manner of tradition, gave them, through its
+ministers, cruelly false hopes of the old man's ultimate recovery.
+Besides, they could not well order things otherwise. The extravagant
+hospitality of the day demanded such ceremonial, and to have abated any
+part of it would only have served to grieve and to alarm the object of
+their care.
+
+The whole business was a constant pride and joy to old Mr. Jacob Dolph.
+When there was a dinner to be given, he would follow Aline as she went
+about the house superintending the preparations of her servants, in her
+flowered apron of black silk, with her bunch of keys--honest keys,
+those, a good four inches long, with tongues as big as a
+domino--jingling at her side. He would himself overlook the making ready
+of the wines, and give oft-repeated instructions as to the proper
+temperature for the port, and see that the champagne was put on ice in
+the huge octagonal cellaret in the dining-room corner. And when all was
+ready, as like as not he would kiss Aline on the forehead, and say:
+
+"I have a headache to-night, my dear, and I think I shall take my dinner
+in my room."
+
+[Illustration: "Mons'us gran' dinneh, Seh!"]
+
+And he would go feebly up stairs, and when old Julius, who always waited
+upon him, brought up his tray, he would ask:
+
+"Is it a fine dinner, Julius? Did everybody come?"
+
+And Julius would invariably reply, with profound African dignity:
+
+"Mons'us gran' dinneh, seh! 'E fines' dinneh I eveh witness', seh! I
+have stood behin' you' chai', seh, this thutty y'ah, an' I neveh see no
+such a gran' dinneh, Misteh Do'ph, seh!"
+
+"Except the dinner we gave Mr. Hamilton; in State Street, Julius," the
+old man would put in.
+
+"_Ex_cep' that, seh," Julius would gravely reply: "_that_ was a
+pol-litical dinneh, seh; an', _of_ co'se, a pol'litical dinneh--" an
+expressive pause--"but this he' is sho'ly a mons'us fine dinneh, seh."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+His bodily vigor was unimpaired, however, and except that his times of
+entire mental clearness grew fewer and briefer as the months went on,
+there was little change in the old gentleman when the spring of 1829
+came. He was not insane, he was not idiotic, even at the worst. It
+seemed to be simply a premature old age that clouded his faculties. He
+forgot many things, he was weakly absent-minded, often he did not
+recognize a familiar face, and he seemed ever more and more disinclined
+to think and to talk. He liked best to sit in silence, seemingly
+unconscious of the world about him; and if he was aroused from his
+dreamy trance, his wandering speech would show that his last
+thought--and it might have entered his mind hours before, at the
+suggestion of some special event--was so far back in the past that it
+dealt with matters beyond his son's knowledge.
+
+He was allowed to do as he pleased, for in the common affairs of daily
+life he seemed to be able to care for himself, and he plaintively
+resented anything that looked like guardianship. So he kept up his
+custom of walking down into the city, at least as far as St. Paul's. It
+was thought to be safe enough, for he was a familiar figure in the town,
+and had friends at every turn.
+
+But one afternoon he did not return in time for dinner. Young Jacob was
+out for his afternoon ride, which that day had taken him in the
+direction of the good doctor's house. And when he had reached the house,
+he found the doctor likewise mounted for a ride. The doctor was going up
+to Bond Street--the Dolphs' quarter was growing fashionable already--to
+look at a house near Broadway that he had some thoughts of buying, for
+he was to be married the coming winter. So they had ridden back
+together, and after a long examination of the house, young Jacob had
+ridden off for a gallop through the country lanes; and it was five
+o'clock, and dinner was on the table, when he came to his father's house
+and learned from tearful Aline that his father was missing.
+
+The horse was at the stable door when young Jacob mounted him once more
+and galloped off to Bond Street, where he found the doctor just ready to
+turn down the Bowery; and they joined forces and hurried back, and down
+Broadway, inquiring of the people who sat on their front stoops--it was
+a late spring evening, warm and fair--if they had seen old Mr. Dolph
+that day.
+
+Many had seen him as he went down; but no one could remember that the
+old gentleman had come back over his accustomed path. At St. Paul's, the
+sexton thought that Mr. Dolph had prolonged his walk down the street.
+Further on, some boys had seen him, still going southward. The searchers
+stopped at one or two of the houses where he might have called; but
+there was no trace of him. It was long since old Jacob Dolph had made a
+formal call.
+
+But at Bowling Green they were hailed by Mr. Philip Waters, who came
+toward them with more excitement in his mien than a young man of good
+society often exhibited.
+
+"I was going for a carriage, Dolph," he said: "your father is down there
+in the Battery Park, and I'm afraid--I'm afraid he's had a stroke of
+paralysis."
+
+They hurried down, and found him lying on the grass, his head on the lap
+of a dark-skinned, ear-ringed Spanish sailor. He had been seen to fall
+from the bench near by, another maritime man in the crowd about him
+explained.
+
+"It was only a minit or two ago," said the honest seafarer, swelled with
+the importance that belongs to the narrator of a tale of accident and
+disaster. "He was a-settin' there, had been for two hours 'most, just
+a-starin' at them houses over there, and all of a sudden chuck forward
+he went, right on his face. And then a man come along that knowed him,
+and said he'd go for a kerridge, or I'd 'a' took him on my sloop--she's
+a-layin' here now, with onions from Weathersfield--and treated him
+well; I see he wa'n't no disrespectable character. Here, Pedro, them's
+the old man's folks--let 'em take him. A-settin' there nigh on two
+hours, he was, just a-studyin' them houses. B'long near here?"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Young Jacob had no words for the Connecticut captain. Waters had
+arrived, with somebody's carriage, confiscated on the highway, and they
+gently lifted up the old gentleman and set off homeward. They were just
+in time, for Waters had been the earliest of the evening promenaders to
+reach the Battery. It was dinner hour--or supper hour for many--and the
+park was given up to the lounging sailors from the river-side streets.
+
+The doctor's face was dark.
+
+"No, it is not paralysis," he said. "Let us proceed at once to your own
+home, Mr. Dolph. In view of what I am now inclined to consider his
+condition, I think it would be the most advisable course."
+
+He was as precise and exact in his speech, even then, as he was later
+on, when years had given an innocent, genial pomposity to his delivery
+of his rounded sentences.
+
+They put old Jacob Dolph to bed in the room which he had always
+occupied, in his married as in his widowed days. He never spoke again;
+that day, indeed, he hardly moved. But on the next he stirred uneasily,
+as though he were striving to change his position. The doctor bled him,
+and they shifted him as best they could, but he seemed no more
+comfortable. So the doctor bled him again; and even that did no good.
+
+About sunset, Aline, who had watched over him with hardly a moment's
+rest, left the room for a quarter of an hour, to listen to what the
+doctors had to say--there were four of them in the drawing-room below.
+When she and her husband entered the sick-room again, the old man had
+moved in his bed. He was lying on his side, his face to the windows that
+looked southward, and he had raised himself a little on his arm. There
+was a troubled gaze in his eyes, as of one who strains to see something
+that is unaccountably missing from his sight. He turned his head a
+little, as though to listen. Thus gazing, with an inward and spiritual
+vision only, at the bay that his eyes might never again see, and
+listening to the waves whose cadence he should hear no more, the
+troubled look faded into one of inscrutable peace, and he sank back into
+the hollow of his son's arm and passed away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next time that the doctor was in the house it was of a snowy night a
+few days after New Year's Day. It was half-past two o'clock in the
+morning, and Jacob Dolph--no longer Jacob Dolph the younger--had been
+pacing furiously up and down the long dining-room--that being the
+longest room in the house--when the doctor came down stairs, and
+addressed him with his usual unruffled precision:
+
+"I will request of you, Dolph, a large glass of port. I need not suggest
+to you that it is unnecessary to stint the measure, for the hospitality
+of this house is----"
+
+"How is she, doctor? For God's sake, tell me--is she--is she----"
+
+"The hospitality of this house is prover--" the precise doctor
+recommenced.
+
+"Damn the hospitality!" cried Jacob Dolph: "I mean--oh, doctor--tell
+me--is anything wrong?"
+
+"Should I request of you the cup of amity and geniality, Mr. Dolph, were
+there cause for anything save rejoicing in this house?" demanded the
+physician, with amiable severity. "I had thought that my words would
+have conveyed----"
+
+"It's all over?"
+
+"And bravely over!" And the doctor nodded his head with a dignified
+cheerfulness.
+
+"And may I go to her?"
+
+"You may, sir, after you have given me my glass of port. But remember,
+sir----"
+
+Dolph turned to the sideboard, grasped a bottle and a glass, and thrust
+them into the doctor's hand, and started for the door.
+
+"But remember, sir," went on the unperturbed physician, "you must not
+agitate or excite her. A gentle step, a tranquil tone, and a cheerful
+and encouraging address, brief and affectionate, will be all that is
+permitted."
+
+Dolph listened in mad impatience, and was over the threshold before the
+doctor's peremptory call brought him back.
+
+"What is it now?" he demanded, impatiently.
+
+The doctor looked at him with a gaze of wonder and reproach.
+
+"It is a male child, sir," he said.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Jacob Dolph crept up the stairs on tiptoe. As he paused for a moment in
+front of a door at the head, he heard the weak, spasmodic wail of
+another Dolph.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"There's no help for it--I've got to do it," said Jacob Dolph.
+
+It was another wintry morning, just after breakfast. The snow was on the
+ground, and the sleigh-bells up in Broadway sent down a faint jingling.
+Ten winters had come and gone, and Mr. Dolph was as comfortably stout as
+a man should be who is well fed and forty. He stood with his back to the
+fire, pulling at his whiskers--which formed what was earlier known as a
+Newgate collar--with his right thumb and forefinger. His left thumb was
+stuck in the armhole of his flowered satin waistcoat, black and shiny.
+
+Opposite him sat a man of his own age, clean-shaven and sharp-featured.
+He had calm, somewhat cold, gray eyes, a deliberate, self-contained
+manner of speaking, and a pallid, dry complexion that suited with his
+thin features. His dress was plain, although it was thoroughly neat. He
+had no flowered satin waistcoat; but something in his bearing told you
+that he was a man who had no anxiety about the narrow things of the
+counting-room; who had no need to ask himself how much money was coming
+in to-morrow. And at the same time you felt that every cent of whatever
+might be to-morrow's dues would find its way to his hands as surely as
+the representative figures stood on his ledger's page. It was young Mr.
+Van Riper--but he, too, had lost his right to that title, not only
+because of his years, but because, in the garret of the house in
+Greenwich Village, a cobweb stretched from one of the low beams to the
+head of old Abram Van Riper's great walking-stick, which stood in the
+corner where it had been placed, with other rubbish, the day after Abram
+Van Riper's funeral.
+
+"I should not advise it, Dolph, if it can be helped," Mr. Van Riper
+observed, thoughtfully.
+
+"It can't be helped."
+
+"I can give you your price, of course," Van Riper went on, with
+deliberation; "but equally of course, it won't be anything like what the
+property will bring in the course of a few years."
+
+Dolph kicked at the hearthrug, as he answered, somewhat testily:
+
+"I'm not making a speculation of it."
+
+Mr. Van Riper was unmoved.
+
+"And I'm not making a speculation of you, either," he said, calmly: "I
+am speaking only for your own benefit, Dolph."
+
+Mr. Dolph put his hands in his pockets, strode to the window and back
+again, and then said, with an uneasy little laugh:
+
+"I beg your pardon, Van Riper; you're quite right, of course. The fact
+is, I've got to do it. I must have the money, and I must have it now."
+
+Mr. Van Riper stroked his sharp chin.
+
+"Is it necessary to raise the money in that particular way? You are
+temporarily embarrassed--I don't wish to be intrusive--but why not
+borrow what you need, and give me a mortgage on the house?"
+
+Ten years had given Jacob Dolph a certain floridity; but at this he
+blushed a hot red.
+
+"Mortgage on the house? No, sir," he said, with emphasis.
+
+"Well, any other security, then," was Van Riper's indifferent amendment.
+
+Again Jacob Dolph strode to the window and back again, staring hard at
+the carpet, and knitting his brows.
+
+Mr. Van Riper waited in undisturbed calm until his friend spoke once
+more.
+
+"I might as well tell you the truth, Van Riper," he said, at last;
+"I've made a fool of myself. I've lost money, and I've got to pocket the
+loss. As to borrowing, I've borrowed all I ought to borrow. I _won't_
+mortgage the house. This sale simply represents the hole in my capital."
+
+Something like a look of surprise came into Mr. Van Riper's wintry eyes.
+
+"It's none of my business, of course," he observed; "but if you haven't
+any objection to telling me----"
+
+"What did it? What does for everybody nowadays? Western lands and Wall
+Street--that's about the whole story. Oh, yes, I know--I ought to have
+kept out of it. But I didn't. I was nothing better than a fool at such
+business. I'm properly punished."
+
+He sighed as he stood on the hearthrug, his hands under his coat-tails,
+and his head hanging down. He looked as though many other thoughts were
+going through his mind than those which he expressed.
+
+"I wish," he began again, "that my poor old father had brought me up to
+business ways. I might have kept out of it all. College is a good thing
+for a man, of course; but college doesn't teach you how to buy lots in
+western cities--especially when the western cities aren't built."
+
+"College teaches you a good many other things, though," said Van Riper,
+frowning slightly, as he put the tips of his long fingers together; "I
+wish I'd had your chance, Dolph. _My_ boy shall go to Columbia, that's
+certain."
+
+"_Your_ boy?" queried Dolph, raising his eyebrows.
+
+Van Riper smiled.
+
+"Yes," he said, "my boy. You didn't know I had a boy, did you? He's
+nearly a year old."
+
+This made Mr. Jacob Dolph kick at the rug once more, and scowl a little.
+
+"I'm afraid I haven't been very neighborly, Van Riper--" he began; but
+the other interrupted him, smiling good-naturedly.
+
+"You and I go different ways, Dolph," he said. "We're plain folks over
+in Greenwich Village, and you--you're a man of fashion."
+
+Jacob Dolph smiled--not very mirthfully. Van Riper's gaze travelled
+around the room, quietly curious.
+
+"It costs money to be a man of fashion, doesn't it?"
+
+"Yes," said Dolph, "it does."
+
+There was silence for a minute, which Van Riper broke.
+
+"If you've got to sell, Dolph, why, it's a pity; but I'll take it. I'll
+see Ogden to-day, and we can finish the business whenever you wish. But
+in my opinion, you'd do better to borrow."
+
+Dolph shook his head.
+
+"I've been quite enough of a fool," he replied.
+
+"Well," said Mr. Van Riper, rising, "I must get to the office. You'll
+hear from Ogden to-morrow. I'm sorry you've got in such a snarl; but--"
+his lips stretched into something like a smile--"I suppose you'll know
+better next time. Good-day."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Mr. Dolph had bowed his guest to the door, Mrs. Dolph slipped down
+the stairs and into the drawing-room.
+
+"Did he take it?" she asked.
+
+"Of course he took it," Dolph answered, bitterly, "at that price."
+
+"Did he say anything," she inquired again, "about its being hard for us
+to--to sell it?"
+
+"He said we had better not sell it now--that it would bring more a few
+years hence."
+
+"He doesn't understand," said Mrs. Dolph.
+
+"He _couldn't_ understand," said Mr. Dolph.
+
+Then she went over to him and kissed him.
+
+"It's only selling the garden, after all," she said; "it isn't like
+selling our home."
+
+He put his arm about her waist, and they walked into the breakfast-room,
+and looked out on the garden which to-morrow would be theirs no longer,
+and in a few months would not be a garden at all.
+
+High walls hemmed it in--the walls of the houses which had grown up
+around them. A few stalks stood up out of the snow, the stalks of
+old-fashioned flowers--hollyhock and larkspur and Job's-tears and the
+like--and the lines of the beds were defined by the tiny hedges of box,
+with the white snow-powder sifted into their dark, shiny green. The
+bare rose-bushes were there, with their spikes of thorns, and little
+mounds of snow showed where the glories of the poppy-bed had bloomed.
+
+Jacob Dolph, looking out, saw the clear summer sunlight lying where the
+snow lay now. He saw his mother moving about the paths, cutting a flower
+here and a bud there. He saw himself, a little boy in brave breeches,
+following her about, and looking for the harmless toads, and working
+each one into one of the wonderful legends which he had heard from the
+old German gardener across the way. He saw his father, too, pacing those
+paths of summer evenings, when the hollyhocks nodded their pink heads,
+and glancing up, from time to time, at his mother as she sat knitting at
+that very window. And, last of all in the line, yet first in his mind,
+he saw his wife tripping out in the fresh morning, to smile on the
+flowers she loved, to linger lovingly over the beds of verbena, and to
+pick the little nosegay that stood by the side of the tall coffee-urn at
+every summer-morning breakfast.
+
+And the wife, looking out by his side, saw that splendid boy of theirs
+running over path and bed, glad of the flowers and the air and the
+freedom, full of young life and boyish sprightliness, his long hair
+floating behind him, the light of hope and youth in his bright face.
+
+And to-morrow it would be Van Riper's; and very soon there would be
+houses there, to close up the friendly window which had seen so much,
+which had let so much innocent joy and gladness into the old
+breakfast-room; and there would be an end of flower-bordered paths and
+nodding hollyhocks. She put her face upon her husband's shoulder, and
+cried a little, though he pretended not to know it. When she lifted it,
+somehow she had got her eyes dry, though they were painfully bright and
+large.
+
+"It isn't like selling our house," she said.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+Jacob Dolph got out of the Broadway stage at Bowling Green, followed by
+Eustace Dolph. Eustace Dolph at twenty-two was no more like his father
+than his patrician name was like simple and scriptural Jacob. The elder
+Dolph was a personable man, certainly; a handsome man, even, who looked
+to be nearer forty than fifty-two; and he was well dressed--perhaps a
+trifle out of the mode--and carried himself with a certain genial
+dignity, and with the lightness of a man who has not forgotten that he
+has been a buck in his time. But Eustace was distinctly and unmistakably
+a dandy. There are superficial differences, of course, between the dandy
+of 1852 and the dandy of 1887; but the structural foundation of all
+types of dandy is the same through all ages. Back of the clothes--back
+of the ruffles, or the bright neckcloth, or the high pickardil--which
+may vary with the time or the individual, you will ever find clearly
+displayed to your eyes the obvious and unmistakable spiritual reason
+for and cause of the dandy--and it is always self-assertion pushed
+beyond the bounds of self-respect.
+
+Now, as a matter of fact, young Eustace's garments were not really worse
+than many a man has worn from simple, honest bad taste. To be sure, the
+checked pattern of his trousers was for size like the design of a prison
+grating; he had a coat so blue that it shimmered in the sunlight; his
+necktie was of purple satin, and fearfully and wonderfully made and
+fringed, and decked with gems fastened by little gold chains to other
+inferior guardian gems; and his waistcoat was confected of satin and
+velvet and damask all at once; yet you might have put all these things
+on his father, and, although the effect would not have been pleasant,
+you would never have called the elder gentleman a dandy. In other words,
+it was why young Eustace wore his raiment that made it dandified, and
+not the inherent gorgeousness of the raiment itself.
+
+The exchange of attire might readily have been made, so far as the size
+of the two men was concerned. But only in size were they alike. There
+was nothing of the Dolph in Eustace's face. He bore, indeed, a strong
+resemblance to his maternal great-grandmother, now many years put away
+where she could no longer trouble the wicked, and where she had to let
+the weary be at rest. (And how poor little Aline had wept and wailed
+over that death, and lamented that she had not been more dutiful as a
+child!) But his face was not strong, as the face of Madam Des Anges had
+been. Some strain of a weaker ancestry reappeared in it, and, so to
+speak, changed the key of the expression. What had been pride in the old
+lady bordered on superciliousness in the young man. What had been
+sternness became a mere haughtiness. Yet it was a handsome face, and
+pleasant, too, when the young smile came across it, and you saw the
+white small teeth and the bright, intelligent light in the dark eyes.
+
+The two men strolled through the Battery, and then up South Street, and
+so around through Old Slip. They were on business; but this was also a
+pleasure trip to the elder. He walked doubly in spirit through those
+old streets--a boy by his father's side, a father with his son at his
+elbow. He had not been often in the region of late years. You remember,
+he was a man of pleasure. He was one of the first-fruits of metropolitan
+growth and social culture. His father had made an idler and _dilettante_
+of him. It was only half a life at best, he thought, happy as he had
+been; blessed as he was in wife and child. He was going to make a
+business man of his own boy. After all, it was through the workers that
+great cities grew. Perhaps we were not ripe yet for that European
+institution, the idler. He himself had certain accomplishments that
+other Americans had not. He could _flâner_, for instance. But to have to
+_flâner_ through fifty or sixty or seventy years palled on the spirit,
+he found. And one thing was certain, if any Dolph was ever to be an
+accomplished _flâneur_, and to devote his whole life to that occupation,
+the Dolph fortune must be vastly increased. Old Jacob Dolph had
+miscalculated. The sum he had left in 1829 might have done very well for
+the time, but it was no fortune to idle on among the fashionables of
+1852.
+
+Something of this Mr. Dolph told his son; but the young man, although he
+listened with respectful attention, appeared not to take a deep interest
+in his father's reminiscences. Jacob Dolph fancied even that Eustace did
+not care to be reminded of the city's day of small things. Perhaps he
+had something of the feeling of the successful struggler who tries to
+forget the shabbiness of the past. If this were the case, his pride must
+have been chafed, for his father was eloquent in displaying the powers
+of an uncommonly fine memory; and he had to hear all about the slips,
+and the Fly Market, and the gradual extension of the water-front, and
+the piles on which the old Tontine was built, and the cucumber-wood
+pipes of the old water-company, still lying under their feet. Once, at
+least, he showed a genuine enjoyment of his father's discourse, and that
+was when it ran on the great retinue of servants in which Jacob Dolph
+the elder had indulged himself. I think he was actually pleased when he
+heard that his grandfather had at one time kept slaves.
+
+Wandering in this way, to the running accompaniment of Mr. Dolph's
+lecture, they came to Water Street, and here, as though he were reminded
+of the object of their trip, the father summed up his reminiscences in
+shape for a neat moral.
+
+"The city grows, you see, my boy, and we've got to grow with it. I've
+stood still; but you sha'n't."
+
+"Well, governor," said the younger man, "I'll be frank with you. I don't
+like the prospect."
+
+"You will--you will, my boy. You'll live to thank me."
+
+"Very likely you're right, sir; I don't deny it; but, as I say, I don't
+like the prospect. I don't see--with all due respect, sir--how any
+gentleman can _like_ trade. It may be necessary, and of course I don't
+think it's lowering, or any of that nonsense, you know; but it can't be
+_pleasant_. Of course, if _your_ governor had to do it, it was all
+right; but I don't believe he liked it any better than I should, or he
+wouldn't have been so anxious to keep you out of it."
+
+"My poor father made a great mistake, Eustace. He would admit it now,
+I'm sure, if he were alive."
+
+"Well, sir, I'm going to try it, of course. I'll give it a fair trial.
+But when the two years are up, sir, as we agreed, I hope you won't say
+anything against my going into the law, or--well, yes--" he colored a
+little--"trying what I can do on the Street. I know what you think about
+it, sir," he went on, hastily; "but there are two sides to the question,
+and it's my opinion that, for an intelligent man, there's more money to
+be made up there in Wall Street in one year than can be got out of
+haggling over merchandise for a lifetime."
+
+Jacob Dolph grew red in the face and shook his head vigorously.
+
+"Don't speak of it, sir, don't speak of it!" he said, vehemently. "It's
+the curse of the country. If you have any such infernal opinions, don't
+vent them in my presence, sir. I know what I am talking about. Keep
+clear of Wall Street, sir. It is the straight road to perdition."
+
+They entered one of a row of broad-fronted buildings of notable severity
+and simplicity of architecture. Four square stone columns upheld its
+brick front, and on one of these faded gilt letters, on a ground of
+dingy black, said simply:
+
+    ABRAM VAN RIPER'S SON.
+
+There was no further announcement of Abram Van Riper's Son's character,
+or of the nature of his business. It was assumed that all people knew
+who Abram Van Riper's Son was, and that his (Abram Van Riper's)
+ship-chandlery trade had long before grown into a great "commission
+merchant's" business.
+
+It was full summer, and there were no doors between the pillars to bar
+entrance to the gloomy cavern behind them, which stretched in
+semi-darkness the whole length and width of the building, save for a
+narrow strip at the rear, where, behind a windowed partition, clerks
+were writing at high desks, and where there was an inner and more
+secluded pen for Abram Van Riper's son.
+
+In the front of the cave, to one side, was a hoistway, where bales and
+boxes were drawn up from the cellar or swung twisting and twirling to
+the lofts above. Amidships the place was strewn with small tubs,
+matting-covered bales and boxes, coils of bright new rope, and
+odd-looking packages of a hundred sorts, all of them with gaping wounds
+in their envelopes, or otherwise having their pristine integrity
+wounded. From this it was not difficult to guess that these were samples
+of merchandise. Most of them gave forth odors upon the air, odors
+ranging from the purely aromatic, suggestive of Oriental fancies or
+tropic dreams of spice, to the positively offensive--the latter
+varieties predominating.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+But certain objects upon a long table were so peculiar in appearance
+that the visitors could not pass them by with a mere glance of wonder.
+They looked like small leather pies, badly warped in the baking. A clerk
+in his shirt sleeves, with his straw hat on one side of his head,
+whistled as he cut into these, revealing a livid interior, the color of
+half-cooked veal, which he inspected with care. Eustace was moved to
+positive curiosity.
+
+"What are they?" he inquired of the clerk, pride mingling with disgust
+in his tone, as he caught a smell like unto the smell which might arise
+from raw smoked salmon that had lain three days in the sun.
+
+"Central American," responded the clerk, with brevity, and resumed his
+whistling of
+
+  "My name is Jake Keyser, I was born in Spring Garden;
+     To make me a preacher my father did try."
+
+"Central American _what_?" pursued the inquirer.
+
+"_Rubber!_" said the clerk, with a scorn so deep and far beyond
+expression that the combined pride of the Dolphs and the Des Anges
+wilted into silence for the moment. As they went on toward the rear
+office, while the clerk gayly whistled the notes of
+
+  "It's no use a-blowing, for I am a hard 'un--
+     I'm bound to be a butcher, by heavens, or die!"
+
+Eustace recovered sufficiently to demand of his father:
+
+"I say, sir, shall I have to handle that damned stuff?"
+
+"Hush!" said his senior; "here's Mr. Van Riper."
+
+Mr. Van Riper came to the office door to welcome them, with his thin
+face set in the form of a smile.
+
+"Ah!" he said, "here's the young man, is he? Fine big fellow, Dolph.
+Well, sir, so you are going to embrace a mercantile career, are you?
+That's what they call it in these fine days, Dolph."
+
+"I am going to try to, sir," replied the young man.
+
+"He will, Van Riper," put in his father, hastily; "he'll like it as soon
+as he gets used to it--I know he will."
+
+"Well," returned Mr. Van Riper, with an attempt at facetious geniality,
+"we'll try to get his nose down to the grindstone, we will. Come into my
+office with me, Dolph, and I'll hand this young gentleman over to old
+Mr. Daw. Mr. Daw will feel his teeth--eh, Mr. Daw?--see what he
+_doesn't_ know--how's that, Mr. Daw? You remember Mr. Daw, Dolph--used
+to be with your father before he went out of business--been with us ever
+since. Let's see, how long is that, Daw? Most fifty years, ain't it?"
+
+[Illustration: "Looks like his father," was Mr. Daw's comment.]
+
+Mr. Daw, who looked as though he might have been one hundred years at
+the business, wheeled around and descended with stiff deliberation from
+his high stool, holding his pen in his mouth as he solemnly shook hands
+with Jacob Dolph, and peered into his face. Then he took the pen out of
+his mouth.
+
+"Looks like his father," was Mr. Daw's comment. "Forty-five years the
+twenty-ninth of this month, sir. You was a little shaver then. I
+remember you comin' into the store and whittlin' timber with your little
+jack-knife. I was only eleven years with your father, sir--eleven years
+and six months--went to him when I was fourteen years old. That's
+fifty-six years and six months in the service of two of the best houses
+that ever was in New York--an' I can do my work with any two young
+shavers in the town--ain't missed a day in nineteen years now. Your
+father hadn't never ought to have gone out of business, Mr. Dolph. He
+did a great business for those days, and he had the makin' of a big
+house. Goin' to bring your boy up like a good New York merchant, hey?
+Come along here with me, young man, and I'll see if you're half the man
+your grandfather was. He hadn't never ought to have given up business,
+Mr. Dolph. But he was all for pleasuring an' the play-houses, an' havin'
+fine times. Come along, young man. What's your name?"
+
+"Eustace Dolph."
+
+"Hm! Jacob's better."
+
+And he led the neophyte away.
+
+"Curious old case," said Mr. Van Riper, dryly. "Best accountant in New
+York. See that high stool of his?--can't get him off it. Five years ago
+I gave him a low desk and an arm-chair. In one week he was back again,
+roosting up there. Said he didn't feel comfortable with his feet on the
+ground. He thought that sort of thing might do for aged people, but _he_
+wasn't made of cotton-batting."
+
+Thus began Eustace Dolph's apprenticeship to business, and mightily ill
+he liked it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There came a day, a winter day in 1854, when there was great agitation
+among what were then called the real old families of New York. I cannot
+use the term "fashionable society," because that is more comprehensive,
+and would include many wealthy and ambitious families from New England,
+who were decidedly not of the Dolphs' set. And then, the Dolphs could
+hardly be reckoned among the leaders of fashion. To live on or near the
+boundaries of fashion's domain is to lower your social status below the
+absolute pitch of perfection, and fashion in 1854 drew the line pretty
+sharply at Bleecker Street. Above Bleecker Street the cream of the cream
+rose to the surface; below, you were ranked as skim milk. The social
+world was spreading up into the wastes sacred to the circus and the
+market-garden, although, if Admiral Farragut had stood on his sea-legs
+where he stands now, he might have had a fairly clear view of Chelsea
+Village, and seen Alonzo Cushman II., or Alonzo Cushman III., perhaps,
+going around and collecting his rents.
+
+But the old families still fought the tide of trade, many of them
+neck-deep and very uncomfortable. They would not go from St. John's
+Park, nor from North Moore and Grand Streets. They had not the
+_bourgeois_ conservatism of the Greenwich Villagers, which has held them
+in a solid phalanx almost to this very day; but still, in a way, they
+resented the up-town movement, and resisted it. So that when they did
+have to buy lots in the high-numbered streets they had to pay a fine
+price for them.
+
+It was this social party that was stirred by a bit of scandal about the
+Dolphs. I do not know why I should call it scandal; yet I am sure
+society so held it. For did not society whisper it, and nod and wink
+over it, and tell it in dark corners, and chuckle, and lift its
+multitudinous hands and its myriad eyebrows, and say in innumerable
+keys: "Well, _upon_ my word!" and "Well, I _should_ think----!" and "Who
+would _ever_ have thought of such a thing?" and the like? Did not
+society make very funny jokes about it, and did not society's
+professional gossips get many an invitation to dinner because they
+professed to have authentic details of the way Mr. and Mrs. Dolph looked
+when they spoke about it, and just what they had to say for themselves?
+
+And yet it was nothing more than this, that Mr. Dolph being fifty-four,
+and his wife but a few years younger, were about to give to the world
+another Dolph. It was odd, I admit; it was unusual; if I must go so far,
+it was, I suppose, unconventional. But I don't see that it was necessary
+for Mr. Philip Waters to make an epigram about it. It was a very clever
+epigram; but if you had seen dear old Mrs. Dolph, with her rosy cheeks
+and the gray in her hair, knitting baby-clothes with hands which were
+still white and plump and comely, while great dark eyes looked
+timorously into the doubtful, fear-clouded future, I think you would
+have been ashamed that you had even listened to that epigram.
+
+The expected event was of special and personal interest to only three
+people--for, after all, when you think of it, it was not exactly
+society's business--and it affected them in widely different ways.
+
+Jacob Dolph was all tenderness to his wife, and all sympathy with her
+fears, with her nervous apprehensions, even with her morbid forebodings
+of impossible ills. He did not repine at the seclusion which the
+situation forced upon them, although his life for years had been given
+up to society's demands, until pleasure-seeking and pleasure-giving had
+grown into a routine, which occupied his whole mind. His wife saw him
+more than she had for many years. Clubs and card-parties had few
+temptations for him now; he sat at home and read to her and talked to
+her, and did his best to follow the injunctions of the doctor, and
+"create and preserve in her a spirit of cheerful and hopeful
+tranquillity, free of unnecessary apprehension."
+
+But when he _did_ go to the club, when he was in male society, his
+breast expanded, and if he had to answer a polite inquiry as to Mrs.
+Dolph's general health, I am afraid that he responded: "Mrs. Dolph is
+extremely well, sir, extremely well!" with a pride which the moralists
+will tell you is baseless, unworthy, and unreasonable.
+
+As for Aline herself, no one may know what timorous hopes stirred in her
+bosom and charmed the years away, and brought back to her a lovely youth
+that was almost girlish in its innocent, half-frightened gladness.
+Outside, this great, wise, eminently proper world that she lived in
+girded at the old woman who was to bear a child, and laughed behind
+tasselled fans, and made wondrous merry over Nature's work; but within
+the old house she sat, and sewed upon the baby-clothes, or, wandering
+from cupboard to cupboard, found the yellowing garments, laid away more
+than a score of years before--the poor little lace-decked trifles that
+her first boy had worn; and she thanked heaven, in her humble way, that
+twenty-four years had not taken the love and joy of a wife and a mother
+out of her heart.
+
+She could not find all her boy's dresses and toys, for she was
+open-handed, and had given many of them away to people who needed them.
+This brought about an odd encounter. The third person who had a special
+interest in the prospect of the birth of a Dolph was young Eustace, and
+he found nothing in it wherewith to be pleased. For Eustace Dolph was of
+the ultra-fashionables. He cared less for old family than for new ideas,
+and he did not let himself fall behind in the march of social progress,
+even though he was, as he admitted with humility born of pride, only a
+poor devil of a down-town clerk. If his days were occupied, he had his
+nights to himself, and he lengthened them to suit himself. At first this
+caused his mother to fret a little; but poor Aline had come into her
+present world from the conventional seclusion of King's Bridge, and her
+only authority on questions of masculine license was her husband. He,
+being appealed to, had to admit that his own hours in youth had been
+late, and that he supposed the hours of a newer generation should
+properly be later still. Mr. Dolph forgot, perhaps, that while his early
+potations had been vinous, those of the later age were distinctly
+spirituous; and that the early morning cocktail and the midnight
+brandy-and-soda were abominations unknown to his own well-bred youth.
+With port and sherry and good Bordeaux he had been familiar all his
+life; a dash of _liqueur_ after dinner did not trouble his digestion; he
+found a bottle of champagne a pleasant appetizer and a gentle stimulant;
+but whiskey and gin were to him the drinks of the vulgar; and rum and
+brandy stood on his sideboard only to please fiercer tastes than his
+own. Perhaps, also, he was ignorant of the temptations that assail a
+young man in a great city, he who had grown up in such a little one that
+he had at one time known every one who was worth knowing in it.
+
+However this may have been, Eustace Dolph ruled for himself his going
+out and his coming in. He went further, and chose his own associates,
+not always from among the scions of the "old families." He found those
+excellent young men "slow," and he selected for his own private circle a
+set which was mixed as to origin and unanimously frivolous as to
+tendency. The foreign element was strongly represented. Bright young
+Irishmen of excellent families, and mysterious French and Italian counts
+and marquises, borrowed many of the good gold dollars of the Dolphs,
+and forgot to return an equivalent in the local currency of the
+O'Reagans of Castle Reagan, or the D'Arcy de Montmorenci, or the
+Montescudi di Bajocchi. Among this set there was much merry-making when
+the news from the Dolph household sifted down to them from the
+gossip-sieve of the best society. They could not very well chaff young
+Dolph openly, for he was muscular and high-tempered, and, under the most
+agreeable conditions, needed a fight of some sort every six months or
+so, and liked a bit of trouble in between fights. But a good deal of low
+and malicious humor came his way, from one source or another, and he,
+with the hot and concentrated egotism of youth, thought that he was in a
+ridiculous and trying position, and chafed over it.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+There had been innuendos and hints and glancing allusions, but no one
+had dared to make any direct assault of wit, until one evening young
+Haskins came into the club "a little flushed with wine." (The "wine" was
+brandy.) It seems that young Haskins had found at home an ivory rattle
+which had belonged to Eustace twenty years before, and which Mrs. Dolph
+had given to Mrs. Haskins when Eustace enlarged his horizon in the
+matter of toys.
+
+Haskins, being, as I have said, somewhat flushed with brandy, came up to
+young Dolph, who was smoking in the window, and meditating with frowning
+brows, and said to him:
+
+"Here, Dolph, I've done with this. You'd better take it back--it may be
+wanted down your way."
+
+There was a scene. Fortunately, two men were standing just behind Dolph,
+who were able to throw their arms about him, and hold him back for a few
+seconds. There would have been further consequences, however, if it had
+not been that Eustace was in the act of throwing the rattle back at
+Haskins when the two men caught him. Thus the toy went wide of its mark,
+and fell in the lap of Philip Waters, who, old as he was, generally
+chose to be in the company of the young men at the club; and then
+Philip Waters did something that almost atones, I think, for the
+epigram.
+
+He looked at the date on the rattle, and then he rose up and went
+between the two young men, and spoke to Haskins.
+
+"Young man," he said, "when Mrs. Jacob Dolph gave your mother this
+thing, your father had just failed for the second time in three years.
+He had come to New York about five years before from Hartford, or
+Providence, or--Succotash, or whatever his confounded town was. Mr.
+Jacob Dolph got Mr. Van Riper to give your father an extension on his
+note, or he would have gone to the debtors' prison down by the City
+Hall. As it was, he had to sell his house, and the coat off his back,
+for all I know. If it hadn't been for the Dolphs, devil the rattle you'd
+have had, and you wouldn't have been living in Bond Street to-day."
+
+[Illustration: "If it hadn't been for the Dolphs, devil the rattle you'd
+have had."]
+
+After which Mr. Philip Waters sat down and read the evening paper; and
+when young Haskins was able to speak he asked young Dolph's pardon, and
+got it--at least, a formal assurance that he had it.
+
+The baby was born in the spring, and everybody said she was the image of
+her mother.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There will come a day, it may be, when advancing civilization will
+civilize sleighing out of existence, as far as New York is concerned.
+Year after year the days grow fewer that will let a cutter slip up
+beyond the farthest of the "road-houses" and cross the line into
+Westchester. People say that the climate is changing; but close
+observers recognize a sympathy between the decrease of snow-storms and
+the increase of refinement--that is, a sympathy in inverse ratio; a
+balanced progress in opposite directions. As we grow further and further
+beyond even old-world standards of polite convention, as we formalize
+and super-formalize our codes, and steadily eliminate every element of
+amusement from our amusements, Nature in strict conformity represses her
+joyous exuberance. The snow-storm of the past is gone, because the great
+public sleigh that held twenty-odd merry-makers in a shell like a circus
+band-wagon has gone out of fashion among all classes. Now we have,
+during severe winters, just enough snow from time to time to bear the
+light sleigh of the young man who, being in good society, is also horsy.
+When _he_ finds the road vulgar, the poor plebeian souls who go
+sleighing for the sport of it may sell their red and blue vehicles, for
+Nature, the sycophant of fashion, will snow no more.
+
+But they had "good old-fashioned" snow-storms eighty years after the
+Declaration of Independence, and one had fallen upon New York that
+tempted Mrs. Jacob Dolph to leave her baby, ten months old, in the
+nurse's charge, and go out with her husband in the great family sleigh
+for what might be the last ride of the season.
+
+They had been far up the road--to Arcularius's, maybe, there swinging
+around and whirling back. They had flown down the long country road, and
+back into the city, to meet--it was early in the day--the great
+procession of sleighing folk streaming northward up Broadway. It was one
+of New York's great, irregular, chance-set carnivals, and every sleigh
+was out, from the "exquisite's" gilded chariot, a shell hardly larger
+than a fair-sized easy-chair, to the square, low-hung red sledge of the
+butcher-boy, who braved it with the fashionables, his _Schneider_-made
+clothes on his burly form, and his girl by his side, in her best Bowery
+bonnet. Everybody was a-sleighing. The jingle of countless bells fell on
+the crisp air in a sort of broken rhythm--a rude _tempo rubato_. It was
+fashionable then. But we--we amuse ourselves less boisterously.
+
+They drew up at the door of the Dolph house, and Jacob Dolph lifted his
+wife out of the sleigh, and carried her up the steps into the
+breakfast-room, and set her down in her easy-chair. He was bending over
+her to ask her if her ride had done her good, when a servant entered and
+handed him a letter marked "Immediate."
+
+He read it, and all the color of the winter's day faded out of his face.
+
+"I've got to go down to Van Riper's," he said, "at once; he wants me."
+
+"Has anything happened to--to Eustace?" his wife cried out.
+
+"He doesn't say so--I suppose--I suppose it's only business of some
+sort," her husband said. His face was white. "Don't detain me, dear.
+I'll come back as soon as--as soon as I get through."
+
+He kissed her, and was gone. Half an hour later he sat in the office of
+Abram Van Riper's Son.
+
+There was no doubting it, no denying it, no palliating it even. The
+curse had come upon the house of Jacob Dolph, and his son was a thief
+and a fugitive.
+
+It was an old story and a simple story. It was the story of the
+Haskins's million and the Dolphs' hundred thousand; it was the story of
+the boy with a hundred thousand in prospect trying to spend money
+against the boy with a million in sight. It was the story of cards,
+speculation--another name for that sort of gambling which is worse than
+any on the green cloth--and what is euphemistically known as wine.
+
+There was enough oral and documentary evidence to make the whole story
+hideously clear to Jacob Dolph, as he sat in that dark little pen of Van
+Riper's and had the history of his son's fall spelled out to him, word
+by word. The boy had proved himself apt and clever in his office work.
+His education had given him an advantage over all the other clerks, and
+he had learned his duties with wonderful ease. And when, six months
+before, old Mr. Daw had let himself down from his stool for the last
+time, and had muffled up his thin old throat in his great green worsted
+scarf, and had gone home to die, young Dolph had been put temporarily in
+his place. In those six months he had done his bad work. Even Van Riper
+admitted that it must have been a sudden temptation. But--he had
+yielded. In those six months fifty thousand dollars of Abram Van Riper's
+money had gone into the gulf that yawned in Wall Street; fifty thousand
+dollars, not acquired by falsifying the books, but filched outright from
+the private safe to which he had access; fifty thousand dollars, in
+securities which he had turned into money, acting as the confidential
+man of the house.
+
+When Jacob Dolph, looking like a man of eighty, left the private office
+of Mr. Van Riper he had two things to do. One was to tell his wife, the
+other was to assign enough property to Van Riper to cover the amount of
+the defalcation. Both had been done before night.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+
+It is to be said for society that there was very little chuckling and
+smiling when this fresh piece of news about the Dolphs came out. Nor did
+the news pass from house to house like wildfire. It rather leaked out
+here and there, percolating through barriers of friendly silence,
+slipping from discreet lips and repeated in anxious confidence, with all
+manner of qualifications and hopeful suppositions and suggestions. As a
+matter of fact, people never really knew just what Eustace Dolph had
+done, or how far his wrong-doing had carried him. All that was ever
+positively known was that the boy had got into trouble down-town, and
+had gone to Europe. The exact nature of the trouble could only be
+conjectured. The very brokers who had been the instruments of young
+Dolph's ruin were not able to separate his authorized speculations from
+those which were illegitimate. They could do no more than guess, from
+what they knew of Van Riper's conservative method of investment, that
+the young man's unfortunate purchases were made for himself, and they
+figured these at fifty-five thousand odd hundred dollars.
+
+Somebody, who looked up the deed which Jacob Dolph executed that winter
+day, found that he had transferred to Van Riper real estate of more than
+that value.
+
+No word ever came from the cold lips of Abram Van Riper's son; and his
+office was a piece of all but perfect machinery, which dared not creak
+when he commanded silence. And no one save Van Riper and Dolph, and
+their two lawyers, knew the whole truth. Dolph never even spoke about it
+to his wife, after that first night. It was these five people only who
+knew that Mr. Jacob Dolph had parted with the last bit of real estate
+that he owned, outside of his own home, and they knew that his other
+property was of a doubtful sort, that could yield at the best only a
+very limited income--hardly enough for a man who lived in so great a
+house, and whose doors were open to all his friends nine months in the
+year.
+
+Yet he stayed there, and grew old with an age which the years have not
+among their gifts. When his little girl was large enough to sit upon his
+knee, her small hands clutched at a snowy-white mustache, and she
+complained that his great, dark, hollow eyes never would look "right
+into hers, away down deep." Yet he loved her, and talked more to her
+perhaps than to any one else, not even excepting Aline.
+
+But he never spoke to her of the elder brother whom she could not
+remember. It was her mother who whispered something of the story to her,
+and told her not to let papa know that she knew of it, for it would
+grieve him. Aline herself knew nothing about the boy save that he lived,
+and lived a criminal. Jacob himself could only have told her that their
+son was a wandering adventurer, known as a blackleg and sharper in every
+town in Europe.
+
+The doors of the great house were closed to all the world, or opened
+only for some old friend, who went away very soon out of the presence of
+a sadness beyond all solace of words, or kindly look, or hand-clasp. And
+so, in something that only the grace of their gentle lives relieved
+from absolute poverty, those three dwelt in the old house, and let the
+world slip by them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was no sleep for any one of the little household in the great
+house on the night of the 14th of July, 1863. Doors and blinds were
+closed; only a light shone through the half-open slats at a second-story
+window, and in that room Aline lay sick, almost unto death, her white
+hair loosed from its usual dainty neatness, her dark eyes turning with
+an unmeaning gaze from the face of the little girl at her side to the
+face of her husband at the foot of her bed. Her hands, wrinkled and
+small, groped over the coverlet, with nervous twitchings, as every now
+and then the howls or the pistol-shots of the mob in the streets below
+them fell on her ear. And at every such movement the lips of the girl by
+her pillow twitched in piteous sympathy. About half-past twelve there
+was sharp firing in volleys to the southward of them, that threw the
+half-conscious sufferer into an agony of supersensitive disturbance.
+Then there came a silence that seemed unnaturally deep, yet it was only
+the silence of a summer night in the deserted city streets.
+
+Through it they heard, sharp and sudden, with something inexplicably
+fearful about it, the patter of running feet. They had heard that sound
+often enough that night and the night before; but these feet stopped at
+their own door, and came up the steps, and the runner beat and pounded
+on the heavy panels.
+
+Father and child looked in each other's eyes, and then Jacob Dolph left
+his post at the foot of the bed, and, passing out of the room, went down
+the stairs with deliberate tread, and opened the door.
+
+A negro's face, almost gray in its mad fear, stared into his with a
+desperate appeal which the lips could not utter. Dolph drew the man in,
+and shut the door behind him. The negro leaned, trembling and exhausted,
+against the wall.
+
+"I knowed you'd take me in, Mist' Dolph," he panted; "I'm feared they
+seen me, though--they was mighty clost behind."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+They were close behind him, indeed. In half a minute the roar of the
+mob filled the street with one terrible howl and shriek of animal rage,
+heard high above the tramp of half a thousand feet; and the beasts of
+disorder, gathered from all the city's holes and dens of crime, wild for
+rapine and outrage, burst upon them, sweeping up the steps, hammering at
+the great doors, crying for the blood of the helpless and the
+innocent.
+
+[Illustration: "Have you got a nigger here?"]
+
+Foreign faces, almost all! Irish, mostly; but there were heavy, ignorant
+German types of feature uplifted under the gas-light; sallow,
+black-mustached Magyar faces; thin, acute, French faces--all with the
+stamp of old-world ignorance and vice upon them.
+
+The door opened, and the white-haired old gentleman, erect, haughty,
+with brightening eyes, faced the leader of the mob--a great fellow,
+black-bearded, who had a space to himself on the stoop, and swung his
+broad shoulders from side to side.
+
+"Have you got a nigger here?" he began, and then stopped short, for
+Jacob Dolph was looking upon the face of his son.
+
+Vagabond and outcast, he had the vagabond's quick wit, this leader of
+infuriate crime, and some one good impulse stirred in him of his
+forfeited gentlehood. He turned savagely upon his followers.
+
+"He ain't here!" he roared. "I told you so--I saw him turn the corner."
+
+"Shtap an' burrn the bondholder's house!" yelled a man behind. Eustace
+Dolph turned round with a furious, threatening gesture.
+
+"You damned fool!" he thundered; "he's no bondholder--he's one of _us_.
+Go on, I tell you! Will you let that nigger get away?"
+
+He half drove them down the steps. The old man stepped out, his face
+aflame under his white hair, his whole frame quivering.
+
+"You lie, sir!" he cried; but his voice was drowned in the howl of the
+mob as it swept around the corner, forgetting all things else in the
+madness of its hideous chase.
+
+When Jacob Dolph returned to his wife's chamber, her feeble gaze was
+lifted to the ceiling. At the sound of his footsteps she let it fall
+dimly upon his face. He was thankful that, in that last moment of
+doubtful quickening, she could not read his eyes; and she passed away,
+smiling sweetly, one of her white old hands in his, and one in her
+child's.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Age takes small account of the immediate flight of time. To the young, a
+year is a mighty span. Be it a happy or an unhappy year that youth
+looks forward to, it is a vista that stretches far into the future. And
+when it is done, this interminable year, and youth, just twelve months
+older, looks back to the first of it, what a long way off it is! What
+tremendous progress we have made! How much more we know! How
+insufficient are the standards by which we measured the world a poor
+three hundred and sixty-five days back!
+
+But age has grown habituated to the flight of time. Years? we have seen
+so many of them that they make no great impression upon us. What! is it
+ten years since young Midas first came to the counting-room, asking
+humbly for an entry-clerk's place--he who is now the head of the firm?
+Bless us! it seems like yesterday. Is it ten years since we first put on
+that coat? Why, it must be clean out of the fashion by this time.
+
+But age does not carry out the thought, and ask if itself be out of the
+fashion. Age knows better. A few wrinkles, a stoop in the back, a
+certain slowness of pace, do not make a man old at sixty--nor at
+seventy, neither; for now you come to think of it, the ten years we were
+speaking of is gone, and it is seventy now, and not sixty. Seventy! Why,
+'tis not to be thought of as old age--save when it may be necessary to
+rebuke the easy arrogance of youth.
+
+The time had come to Jacob Dolph when he could not feel that he was
+growing old. He was old, of course, in one sense. He was sixty-one when
+the war broke out; and they had not allowed him to form a regiment and
+go to the front at its head. But what was old for a soldier in active
+service was not old for a well-preserved civilian. True, he could never
+be the same man again, now that poor Aline was gone. True, he was
+growing more and more disinclined for active exercise, and he regretted
+he had led so sedentary a life. But though '64 piled itself up on '63,
+and '65 on top of that, these arbitrary divisions of time seemed to him
+but trivial.
+
+Edith was growing old, perhaps; getting to be a great girl, taller than
+her mother and fairer of complexion, yet not unlike her, he sometimes
+thought, as she began to manage the affairs of the house, and to go
+about the great shabby mansion with her mother's keys jingling at her
+girdle. For the years went on crawling one over the other, and soon it
+was 1873, and Edith was eighteen years old.
+
+One rainy day in this year found Jacob Dolph in Wall Street. Although he
+himself did not think so, he was an old man to others, and kindly hands,
+such as were to be found even in that infuriate crowd, had helped him up
+the marble steps of the Sub-Treasury and had given him lodgment on one
+of the great blocks of marble that dominate the street. From where he
+stood he could see Wall Street, east and west, and the broad plaza of
+Broad Street to the south, filled with a compact mass of men, half
+hidden by a myriad of umbrellas, rain-soaked, black, glinting in the dim
+light. So might a Roman legion have looked, when each man raised his
+targum above his head and came shoulder to shoulder with his neighbor
+for the assault.
+
+There was a confused, ant-like movement in the vast crowd, and a dull
+murmur came from it, rising, in places, into excited shouts. Here and
+there the fringe of the mass swelled up and swept against the steps of
+some building, forcing, or trying to force, an entry. Sometimes a narrow
+stream of men trickled into the half-open doorway; sometimes the great
+portals closed, and then there was a mad outcry and a low groan, and the
+foremost on the steps suddenly turned back, and in some strange way
+slipped through the throng and sped in all directions to bear to hushed
+or clamorous offices the news that this house or that bank had
+"suspended payment." "Busted," the panting messengers said to
+white-faced merchants; and in the slang of the street was conveyed the
+message of doom. The great panic of 1873 was upon the town--the outcome
+of long years of unwarranted self-confidence, of selfish extravagance,
+of conscienceless speculation--and, as hour after hour passed by,
+fortunes were lost in the twinkling of an eye, and the bread was taken
+out of the mouths of the helpless.
+
+After Jacob Dolph had stood for some time, looking down upon the
+tossing sea of black umbrellas, he saw a narrow lane made through the
+crowd in the wake of a little party of clerks and porters, bearing aid
+perhaps to some stricken bank. Slipping down, he followed close behind
+them. Perhaps the jostling hundreds on the sidewalk were gentle with
+him, seeing that he was an old man; perhaps the strength of excitement
+nerved him, for he made his way down the street to the flight of steps
+leading to the door of a tall white building, and he crowded himself up
+among the pack that was striving to enter. He had even got so far that
+he could see the line pouring in above his head, when there was a sudden
+cessation of motion in the press, and one leaf of the outer iron doors
+swung forward, meeting the other, already closed to bar the crush, and
+two green-painted panels stood, impassable, between him and the last of
+the Dolph fortune.
+
+One howl and roar, and the crowd turned back on itself, and swept him
+with it. In five minutes a thousand offices knew of the greatest failure
+of the day; and Jacob Dolph was leaning--weak, gasping, dazed--against
+the side wall of a hallway in William Street, with two stray office-boys
+staring at him out of their small, round, unsympathetic eyes.
+
+Let us not ask what wild temptation led the old man back again to risk
+all he owned in that hellish game that is played in the narrow street.
+We may remember this: that he saw his daughter growing to womanhood in
+that silent and almost deserted house, shouldered now by low tenements
+and wretched shops and vile drinking-places; that he may have pictured
+for her a brighter life in that world that had long ago left him behind
+it in his bereaved and disgraced loneliness; that he had had some vision
+of her young beauty fulfilling its destiny amid sweeter and fairer
+surroundings. And let us not forget that he knew no other means than
+these to win the money for which he cared little; which he found
+absolutely needful.
+
+After Jacob Dolph had yielded for the last time to the temptation that
+had conquered him once before, and had ruined his son's soul; after that
+final disastrous battle with the gamblers of Wall Street, wherein he
+lost the last poor remnant of the great Dolph fortune, giving up with it
+his father's home forever, certain old bread of his father's casting
+came back to him upon strange waters.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Abram Van Riper came to the daughter of the house of Dolph, a little
+before it became certain that the house must be sold, and told her, in
+his dry way, that he had to make a business communication to her, for he
+feared that her father was hardly capable of understanding such matters
+any longer. She winced a little; but he took a load off her heart when
+he made his slow, precise explanation. The fact was, he said, that the
+business transactions between her father and himself, consequent upon
+the defalcation of her brother Eustace, had never been closed, in all
+these seventeen years. (Edith Dolph trembled.) It was known at the time
+that the property transferred by her father rather more than covered the
+amount of her brother's--peculation. But her father's extreme
+sensitiveness had led him to avoid a precise adjustment, and as the
+property transferred was subject to certain long leases, he, Mr. Van
+Riper, had thought it best to wait until the property was sold and the
+account closed, to settle the matter with Mr. Dolph. This had lately
+been done, and Mr. Van Riper found that, deducting charges, and interest
+on his money at seven per cent., he had made by the transaction six
+thousand three hundred and seventy dollars. This sum, he thought,
+properly belonged to Mr. Dolph. And if Miss Dolph would take the counsel
+of an old friend of her father's, she would leave the sum in charge of
+the house of Abram Van Riper's Son. The house would invest it at ten per
+cent.--he stopped and looked at Edith, but she only answered him with
+innocent eyes of attention--and would pay her six hundred and
+thirty-seven dollars annually in quarterly payments. It might be of
+assistance to Mr. Dolph in his present situation.
+
+It was of assistance. They lived on it, father and daughter, with such
+aid as Decorative Art--just introduced to this country--gave in
+semi-remunerative employment for her deft fingers.
+
+Abram Van Riper, when he left the weeping, grateful girl, marched out
+into the street, turned his face toward what was once Greenwich Village,
+and said to his soul:
+
+"I think that will balance any obligation my father may have put himself
+under in buying that State Street house too cheap. Now then, old
+gentleman, you can lie easy in your grave. The Van Ripers ain't beholden
+to the Dolphs, that's sure."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A few years ago--shall we say as many as ten?--there were two small
+rooms up in a quiet street in Harlem, tenanted by an old gentleman and a
+young gentlewoman; and in the front room, which was the young woman's
+room by night, but a sort of parlor or sitting-room in the daytime, the
+old gentleman stood up, four times a year, to have his collar pulled up,
+and his necktie set right, and his coat dusted off by a pair of small
+white hands, so that he might be presentable when he went down town to
+collect certain moneys due him.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+They were small rooms, but they were bright and cheerful, being
+decorated with sketches and studies of an artistic sort, which may have
+been somewhat crude and uncertain as to treatment, but were certainly
+pleasant and feminine. Yet few saw them save the young woman and the old
+man. The most frequent visitor was a young artist from the West, who
+often escorted Miss Dolph to and from the Art League rooms. His name was
+Rand; he had studied in Munich; he had a future before him, and was
+making money on his prospects. He might just as well have lived in
+luxurious bachelor quarters in the lower part of the city; but, for
+reasons of his own, he preferred to live in Harlem.
+
+Old Mr. Dolph insisted on going regularly every quarter-day to the
+office of the Van Riper Estate, "to collect," as he said, "the interest
+due him." Four times a year he went down town on the Eighth Avenue cars,
+where the conductors soon learned to know him by his shiny black
+broadcloth coat and his snow-white hair. His daughter was always uneasy
+about these trips; but her father could not be dissuaded from them. To
+him they were his one hold on active life--the all-important events of
+the year. It would have broken his tender old heart to tell him that he
+could not go to collect his "interest." And so she set his necktie
+right, and he went.
+
+When he got out of the car at Abingdon Square he tottered, in his slow,
+old way, to a neat structure which combined modern jauntiness with
+old-time solidity, and which was labelled simply: "Office of the Van
+Riper Estate," and there he told the smilingly indulgent clerk that he
+thought he would "take it in cash, this time," and, taking it in cash,
+went forth.
+
+And then he walked down through Greenwich Village into New York city,
+and into the street where stood the house that his father had built.
+Thus he had gone to view it four times a year, during every year save
+the first, since he had given it up.
+
+He had seen it go through one stage of decadence after another. First it
+was rented, by its new owner, to the Jewish pawnbroker, with his
+numerous family. Good, honest folk they were, who tried to make the
+house look fine, and the five daughters made the front stoop resplendent
+of summer evenings. But they had long ago moved up-town. Then it was a
+cheap boarding-house, and vulgar and flashy men and women swarmed out in
+the morning and in at eventide. Then it was a lodging-house, and shabby
+people let themselves out and in at all hours of the day and night. And
+last of all it had become a tenement-house, and had fallen into line
+with its neighbors to left and right, and the window-panes were broken,
+and the curse of misery and poverty and utter degradation had fallen
+upon it.
+
+But still it lifted its grand stone front, still it stood, broad and
+great, among all the houses in the street. And it was the old man's
+custom, after he had stood on the opposite sidewalk and gazed at it for
+a while, to go to a little French _café_ a block to the eastward, and
+there to take a glass of _vermouth gommé_--it was a mild drink, and
+pleasing to an old man. Sometimes he chanced to find some one in this
+place who would listen to his talk about the old house--he was very
+grand; but they were decent people who went to that _café_, and perhaps
+would go back with him a block and look at it. We would not have talked
+to chance people in an east-side French _café_. But then we have never
+owned such a house, and lost it--and everything else.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Late one hot summer afternoon young Rand sat in his studio, working
+enthusiastically on a "composition." A new school of art had invaded New
+York, and compositions were everything, for the moment, whether they
+composed anything or nothing. He heard a nervous rattling at his
+door-knob, and he opened the door. A young woman lifted a sweet,
+flushed, frightened face to his.
+
+"Oh, John," she cried, "father hasn't come home yet, and it's five
+o'clock, and he left home at nine."
+
+John Rand threw off his flannel jacket, and got into his coat.
+
+"We'll find him; don't worry, dear," he said.
+
+They found him within an hour. The great city, having no further use for
+the old Dolph house, was crowding it out of existence. With the crashing
+of falling bricks, and the creaking of the tackle that swung the great
+beams downward, the old house was crumbling into a gap between two high
+walls. Already you could see through to where the bright new bricks
+were piled at the back to build the huge eight-story factory that was to
+take its place. But it was not to see this demolition that the crowd was
+gathered, filling the narrow street. It stood, dense, ugly, vulgar,
+stolidly intent, gazing at the windows of the house opposite--a poor
+tenement house.
+
+As they went up the steps they met the young hospital surgeon, going
+back to his ambulance.
+
+"You his folks?" he inquired. "Sorry to tell you so, but I can't do any
+good. Sunstroke, I suppose--may have been something else--but it's
+collapse now, and no mistake. You take charge, sir?" he finished,
+addressing Rand.
+
+Jacob Dolph was lying on his back in the bare front room on the first
+floor. His daughter fell on her knees by his side, and made as though
+she would throw her arms around him; but, looking in his face, she saw
+death quietly coming upon him, and she only bent down and kissed him,
+while her tears wet his brow.
+
+Meanwhile a tall Southerner, with hair halfway down his neck, and
+kindly eyes that moved in unison with his broad gestures, was talking to
+Rand.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"I met the ol' gentleman in the French _café_, neah heah," he said, "and
+he was jus' honing to have me come up and see his house, seh--house he
+used to have. Well, I came right along, an' when we got here, sure
+'nough, they's taihin' down that house. Neveh felt so bad in all my
+life, seh. He wasn't expectin' of it, and I 'lowed 'twuz his old home
+like, and he was right hahd hit, fo' a fact. He said to me, 'Good-day,
+seh,' sezee; 'good-day, seh,' he says to me, an' then he starts across
+the street, an' first thing I know, he falls down flat on his face, seh.
+Saw that theah brick an' mortar comin' down, an' fell flat on his face.
+This hyeh pill-man 'lowed 'twuz sunstroke; but a Southern man like I am
+don't need to be told what a gentleman's feelings are when he sees his
+house a-torn down--no, seh. If you ever down oweh way, seh, I'd be right
+glad----"
+
+But Rand had lifted Edith from the floor, for her father would know her
+no more, and had passed out of this world, unconscious of all the
+squalor and ruin about him; and the poor girl was sobbing on his
+shoulder.
+
+He was very tender with her, very sorry for her--but he had never known
+the walls that fell across the way; he was a young man, an artist, with
+a great future before him, and the world was young to him, and she was
+to be his wife.
+
+Still, looking down, he saw that sweetly calm, listening look, that
+makes beautiful the faces of the dead, come over the face of Jacob
+Dolph, as though he, lying there, heard the hammers of the workmen
+breaking down his father's house, brick by brick--and yet the sound
+could no longer jar upon his ear or grieve his gentle spirit.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+  +----------------------------------------------------------+
+  |Transcriber's Note:                                       |
+  |The following printing errors were corrected in this text.|
+  |  Page 82, period added after 'path'.                     |
+  |           (back over his accustomed path. At)            |
+  |  Page 97, period added after 'said'.                     |
+  |           (selling our house," she said.)                |
+  |  Page 99, 'w' in 'why' changed to lower case.            |
+  |           (it was why young Eustace)                     |
+  |  Page 115, repeated 'the' removed.                       |
+  |           (girded at the old woman)                      |
+  +----------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Story of a New York House, by 
+Henry Cuyler Bunner
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