A Hazard of New Fortunes, Part First

lutions from them. She read the new advertisements aloud with ardor and with faith to believe that the apartments described in them were every one truthfully represented, and that any one of t

een the "cabinet finish, hard-wood floors, and frescoed ceilings" of its fifty-dollar flats; the Asteroid affirmed that such apartments, with "six light rooms and bath, porcelain wash-tubs, electric bells, and hall-boy," as it offered for seventy-five dollars were unapproached by competition. There was a sameness in the jargon which ten

. They recalled the Broadway of five, of ten, of twenty years ago, swelling and roaring with a tide of gayly painted omnibuses and of picturesque traffic that the horsecars have now banished

e any other street. You do not now take your life in your hand when you attempt to cross it; the Broadway policeman who supported the elbow of timorous beauty in the hollow of his cotton-gloved palm and guide

Desert," said March, voicing th

ss of the painted light, the hallowed music took them with solemn ecstasy; the aerial, aspiring Gothic forms seemed to lift them heavenward. They came out, relu

me reason that we went to the Vienna Cafe for breakfast-to gratify an aesthetic sense, to renew the faded pleasure of trav

. I wish we didn't always recognize the facts as we do. Sometimes I should like to bl

ep it up. Honesty is the bes

y for some of my motives to come to the top. I know they're always

. But I prefer not to lay up so many disag

han I was. I feel quite in the mood of that morning when

w I'm not younger;

es, French faces, Spanish faces, as they strolled over the asphalt walks, under the thinning shadows of the autumn-stricken sycamores. They met the familiar picturesque raggedness of Southern Europe with the old kindly illusion that somehow it existed for their appreciation, and that it found adequate compensation for poverty in this. March thought he sufficiently expressed his tacit sympathy in sitting down on one

ould be bought off they went over to look at it. The janitor met them at the door and examined them.

the rooms and the enormity of the rent as he best might. But their self-love had received a wound, and

quare. That might be as if we had walked along the Park Street mall in the Common before we cam

id March. "But I never ca

such things as badly as I do.

mediate possession. Nothing else can soothe my wounded feelings. You were not having your b

to a Fifth Avenue milliner in a Worth dress, and the woman's

y genteel strangers are found in the waters around New York. Shall we try th

he little area in front of the basement was heaped with a mixture of mortar, bricks, laths, and shavings from the interior; the brownstone steps to the front door were similarly bestrewn; the doorway showed the half

ate to contradict them. But they'd better not call it December fi

was present to urge forward the workmen apparently; he lent a hopeful fancy to the solution of all her questions. To get her from under his influence March had to represent that the place was damp from undried plastering, and that if she stayed she would probably be down with that

main force you'd have not only died of New York pneumonia on the spot, bu

the only way I can realize whether it will do

housekeeping in so many different places was not only entertaining, but tended, through association with their

t was unfailing, and that they got a great deal of fun out of it all. Nothing could abate Mrs. March's faith in her advertisements. One of them sent her to a flat of ten rooms which promised to be the solution of all their difficulties; it proved to be over a livery

if they wished to keep their self-respect, and that within the region to which they had restricted themselves there was a choice of streets. At first all the New York streets looked to them ill-paved, dirty, and repulsive; the general infamy imparted itself in their casual impression to streets in no wise guilty. But they began to notice that some streets were quiet and clean, and, though never so quiet and clean as Boston streets, that they wore an air of encouraging reform, and suggested a future of greater and greater domesticity. Whole blocks of these downtown cross-streets seemed to have been redeemed from decay, and even in the midst of squalor a dwelling here and there had been seized, painted a dull red as to its brick-work, and a glossy black as to its wood-work, and with a bright brass bell-pull and door-knob and a large brass plate for its key-hole escutcheon, had been endowed with an effect of purity and pride which removed its shabby neighborhood far fr

ould only do so upon the supposition that in their European days they were too young, too happy, too full of the future, to notice whether rooms wer

an elevator. At one place they almost did it. They had resigned themselves to the humility of the neighborhood, to the prevalence of modistes and livery-stablemen (they seem to consort much in New York), to the garbage in the gutters and the litter of paper in the streets, to the faltering s

the janitor was respectful and enthusiastic; at the second he had an effect of ironical pessimism. When they trembled on the verge of taking his apartment, he pointed out a spot in the kalsomining of the parlor ceiling, and gratuitously said, Now such a thing as that he should not agree to put in shape unless they took the apartment f

and to that house with the pathetic widow and the pretty daughter who wished to take them to board. They stayed to excuse their blunder, and easily came by the fact that the mother had taken the house that the girl might have a home while she w

hen they had got away. "Now if we were truly humane we would modify our

east not in that sense. You know you hate boarding; and if we

n you would tak

eak, Basil, and let every little thing work upon you in that way,

h me, as if I were a child that had its

such a child in some respects that I like

t shrieks and yells with ugliness here and there but it never loses its spirits. That widow is from the country. When she's been a year in New York she'll be as gay-as gay as an L road." He celebrated a satisfaction they both had in the L roads. "They kill the streets and avenues, but at least they partially hide them, and that is some comfort; and they do triumph over their prostrate forms with a savage exu

h. "But frantic. I can't get used to it. They fo

I've ever found much adva

such a thin

levity equal to that of the New-Yorkers in proposing such a thing; and they dragged through the day. She was too tired to care for dinner, and in the night she had a dream from which she woke herself with a cry that roused him, too. It was something about the children at first, whom they had talked of wistfu

frightful thing about

was nothing but a harmless New

ng an architectural resemblance, and she fell aslee