it.
But all this morning I must be closely engaged. An important event
happened last night. At eleven, positively, be ready to go out with me."

Agnes was ready, and stepped forth into the daylight on the main
thoroughfare of Queen Street. Almost every window was filled with
gazers; the sidewalks were lined with strollers, loiterers, and people
waiting. She might have fainted if Duff Salter's arm had not been there
to sustain her.

A large fishwife, with a basket on her head, was standing beside her
comely grown daughter, who had put her large basket down, and both
devoured Agnes with their eyes.

"Staying in the house, Beck," exclaimed the mother of the girl, "has
been healthy for some people."

"Yes, mammy," answered the girl; "it's safer standing in market with
catfish. He! he! he!"

A shipbuilder's daughter was on the front steps, a slender girl of dark,
smooth skin and features, talking to a grown boy. The girl bowed: "How
do you do, Miss Agnes?" The grown boy giggled inanely.

Two old women, near neighbors of Agnes, had their spectacles wiped and
run out to a proper focus, and the older of the two had a double pair
upon her most insidious and suspicious nose. As Agnes passed, this old
lady gave such a start that she dropped the spectacles off her nose, and
ejaculated through the open window, "Lord alive!"

At Knox Van de Lear's house the fine-bodied, feline lady with
nictitating eyes, drew aside the curtain, even while the dying man above
was in frigid waters, that she might slowly raise and drop her ambrosial
lids, and express a refined but not less marked surprise. Agnes, by an
excitement of the nerves of apprehension, saw everything while she
trembled. She could read the dates of all the houses on the painted
cornices of the water-spouts, and saw the cabalistic devices of old
insurance companies on the property they covered. Pigeons flying about
the low roofs clucked and chuckled as if their milky purity had been
incensed, and little dogs seemed to draw near and trot after, too
familiarly, as if they scented sin.

There were two working-men from Zane & Rainey's ship-yard who had known
kindness to their wives from Agnes when those wives were in confinement.
Both took off their hats respectfully, but with astonishment
overwhelming their pity.

Half the fire company had congregated at one corner of the street--lean,
runners of men in red shirts, and with boots outside their trousers.
They did not say a