me stretch of green with its scattered gravestones. And, outside, the
same old demon of hurry, defied and hurled back by a lifted hand armed
with the cross.

Of these three breathing-spaces, St. Mark's is, perhaps, a little
greener in the early spring, less dusty in the summer heat, less bare
and uninviting in the winter snow. It is more restful, too, than the
others, a place in which to sit and muse--even to read. Out from its
shade and sunshine run queer side streets, with still queerer houses,
rising two stories and an attic, each with a dormer and huge chimney.
Dried-up old aristocrats, these, living on the smallest of pensions,
taking toll of notaries public, shyster lawyers, peddlers of steel pens,
die-cutters, and dismal real-estate agents in dismal offices boasting a
desk, two chairs, and a map.

Stephen's course lay in the direction of one of these relics of better
days--a wide-eyed house with a pieced-out roof, flattened like an old
woman's wig over a sloping forehead, the eyebrows of eaves shading
two blinking windows. A most respectable old dowager of a building, no
doubt, in its time, with the best of Madeira and the choicest of cuts
going down two steps into its welcoming basement. That was before the
iron railings were covered with rust and before the three brownstone
steps leading to the front door were worn into scoops by heavy shoes;
before the polished mahogany doors were replaced by pine and painted a
dull, dirty green; before the banisters with their mahogany rail were
as full of cavities as a garden fence with half its palings gone; and
before--long before--some vulgar Paul Pry had cut a skylight in the
hipped roof, through which he could peer, taking note of whatever went
on inside the gloomy interior: each of these several calamities but so
much additional testimony to its once grand estate, and every one of
them but so many steps in its downward career.

For it had become anything but a happy house--this old dowager dwelling
of the long ago. Indeed, it was a very mournful and most depressing
house, and so were its tenants. In the basement was a barber who spent
half his time lounging about inside the small door, without his white
jacket, waiting for customers. On the first-floor-back there was a
music-teacher whose pupils were so few and far between that only the
shortest of lessons at the longest of intervals were recited on her
piano; on the second-floor-front was a wood-engraver who took to