of simple levity it is to
be feared that he was neither properly ashamed nor adequately rebuked.

It was in the old city, below Twenty-third Street, that the work of
time had been most diverse. Here four full eras had left their
mark--the aboriginal, the early Dutch, the English-American, and lastly
the modern age of granite canyons and sky-seeking towers and marvels of
high air and below ground. Smith knew all four, and if one knows where
to search, there are plenty of interesting relics of the first three
still to be found. He knew how the southern end of Manhattan looked
when Hendrick Hudson moored the Half Moon in the lower harbor; and
where the shore line lay when the old Dutch keels with their high poops
and proud pennons rode at anchor in the river; and again later on when
the English flag had replaced the Dutch, and the towering masts of
frigates and brigs and schooners made with their threaded rigging a
constant etching of the water front.

He guided Helen through old streets where a century's relics still
persisted and where one could still find an occasional cornerstone
which the flight of a hundred hurrying years had not displaced. He was
familiar with most of the old street names,--how West Broadway was once
Chapel Street,--many of them long since abandoned for modern
changelings far less effective. For the first time Helen realized the
origin of the name of "Bouwerie," and how far into New York's and the
nation's traditions reached some of the mossy gravestones in Trinity
Churchyard.

The city, during the progress of the Civil War, of which Helen had
heard Augustus Lispenard speak, was clearer in her vision than ever
before, for Smith's grandfather had marched down Broadway in '61, and,
unlike Mr. Lispenard, he had not come back.

"They were just starting Central Park," Smith said; "because I have
heard mother say often that her father's letters from the front asked
several times how the Park was getting along."

"It seems odd, doesn't it? I had always looked on the Park as
something which must always have been where it is," Miss Maitland
commented. "But I suppose there must have been a beginning some time."

Now all these wanderings and this companionship could not go wholly for
naught. Smith was not at all a sentimental person, and Miss Maitland
was not in search of emotional adventure, but they were on hazardous
ground, and it was hazardous because it was very pleasant to them both.

Mis