at
which is the worst cruelty of all--the cruelty of selfishness. Every
man going his own pace, seeking to gratify his own aims and desires,
unconscious and heedless of the want with which he rubs elbows. Her
natural imagination enhanced by her life among the hills, the girl
peopled the place in the street lights with all kinds of strange
evil-doers of whose sins she knew nothing, adventurers, charlatans,
alert cormorants, who preyed upon the unwary. She shrank closer to
Ephraim from a perfumed lady who sat next to her in the car, and was
thankful when at last they found themselves in the corridor of the Astor
House standing before the desk.

Hotel clerks, especially city ones, are supernatural persons. This one
knew Jethro, greeted him deferentially as Judge Bass, and dipped the
pen in the ink and handed it to him that he might register. By half-past
nine Cynthia was dreaming of Lem Hallowell and Coniston, and Lem was
driving a yellow street-car full of queer people down the road to
Brampton.

There were few guests in the great dining room when they breakfasted at
seven the next morning. New York, in the sunlight, had taken on a more
kindly expression, and those who were near by smiled at them and seemed
full of good-will. Persons smiled at them that day as they walked the
streets or stood spellbound before the shop windows, and some who saw
them felt a lump rise in their throats at the memories they aroused of
forgotten days: the three seemed to bring the very air of the hills with
them into that teeming place, and many who, had come to the city with
high hopes, now in the shackles of drudgery; looked after them. They
were a curious party, indeed: the straight, dark girl with the light in
her eyes and the color in her cheeks; the quaint, rugged figure of
the elderly man in his swallow-tail and brass buttons and square-toed,
country boots; and the old soldier hobbling along with the aid of his
green umbrella, clad in the blue he had loved and suffered for. Had they
remained until Sunday, they might have read an amusing account of their
visit,--of Jethro's suppers of crackers and milk at the Astor House,
of their progress along Broadway. The story was not lacking in pathos,
either, and in real human feeling, for the young reporter who wrote it
had come, not many years before, from the hills himself. But by that
time they had accomplished another marvellous span in their journey, and
were come to Washington itself.