must ask
you to believe me when I tell you that, from the distant street, that
poor, weather-worn old front seemed to have taken on the very grandeur
of mourning, with its great, clean, strong columns simply wreathed in
black and snowy white, that sparkled a little here and there in the
fitful, cold, spring sunlight. Of course, when you drew near to it, it
resolved itself into a bewildering and somewhat indecent confusion of
black petticoats, and starched shirts, and drawers, and skirts, and
baby-clothes, and chemises, and dickies, and neck-cloths, and
handkerchiefs, all twisted up into the most fantastic trappings of woe
that ever decked a genuine and patriotic grief. But I am glad, for
myself, that I can look at it all now from even a greater distance than
the highway at the foot of the lawn.

I must admit that, even in my day, the shops and houses of the Moderate
Means colony had so fringed the broad highway with their trivial,
common-place, weakly pretentious architecture, that very little of the
distinctive character of the old road was left. Certainly, from
Tiemann's to the Deaf and Dumb Asylum--about two miles of straight
road--there was little that had any saving grace of honorable age,
except here and there where some pioneer shanty had squatted itself long
enough ago to have acquired a pleasant look of faded shabbiness. The
tavern and the stage-office, it is true, kept enough of their old
appearance to make a link between those days and the days when swarms of
red-faced drovers, with big woollen comfortables about their big necks,
and with fat, greasy, leather wallets stuffed full of bank-notes,
gathered noisily there, as it was their wont to gather at all the
"Bull's Head Taverns" in and around New York. The omnibuses that crawled
out from New York were comparatively modern--that is, a Broadway 'bus
rarely got ten or fifteen years beyond the period of positive
decrepitude without being shifted to the Washington Heights line. But
under the big shed around the corner still stood the great old George
Washington coach--a structure about the size and shape of a small
canal-boat, with the most beautiful patriotic pictures all over it, of
which I only remember Lord Cornwallis surrendering his sword in the
politest and most theatrical manner imaginable, although the poignancy
of his feelings had apparently turned his scarlet uniform to a pale
orange. This magnificent equipage was a trifle rheumaticky about its
unde