For years Philip Hayn had been wondering about the great city only a hundred or two miles distant from his home,—wondering, reading, and questioning,—until he knew far more about it than thousands of men born and reared on Manhattan Island. He had dreamed of the day when he would visit the city, and had formed plans and itineraries for consuming such time as he hoped to have, changing them again and again to conform to longer or shorter periods. He was prepared to be an intelligent tourist, to see only what was well worth being looked at, and to study much that could not be seen in any other place which he was ever likely to visit.

At last he was in New York: his time would be limited only by the expense of remaining at hotel or boarding-house. Yet he found himself utterly without impulse to follow any of his carefully-perfected plans. He strolled about a great deal, but in an utterly aimless way. He passed public buildings which he knew by sight as among those he had intended to inspect, but he did not even enter their doors; the great libraries in which for years he had hoped to quench the literary thirst that had been little more than tantalized by the collective books in Haynton were regarded with impatience. Of all he saw while rambling about alone, nothing really fixed his attention but the contents of shop-windows. He could not pass a clothing-store without wondering if some of the goods he saw within would not become him better than what he was wearing; he spent hours in looking at displays of dress-goods and imagining how one or other pattern or fabric would look on Lucia; and he wasted many hours more in day-dreams of purchasing—only for her—the bits of jewelry and other ornaments with which some windows were filled.

Loneliness increased the weakening effect of his imaginings. He knew absolutely no one in the city but the Tramlays and Marge, and he had too much sense to impose himself upon them; besides, Marge was terribly uninteresting to him, except as material for a study of human nature,—material that was peculiarly unattractive when such a specimen as Lucia was always in his mind’s eye and insisting upon occupying his whole attention.

His loneliness soon became intolerable; after a single day of it he hurried to the river, regardless of probable criticism and teasing based on his new clothes, to chat with Sol Mantring and the crew of the sloop. The interview was not entirely satisfactory, and Phil cut his visit short, departing with a brow full of wrinkles and a heart full of wonder and indignation at the persistency with which Sol and both his men talked of Lucia Tramlay and the regard in which they assumed Phil held her. How should they imagine such a thing? He well knew—and detested—the rural rage for prying into the affairs of people, particularly young men and women who seemed at all fond of one another; but what had he ever done or said to make these rough fellows think Lucia was to him anything but a boarder in his father’s house? As he wondered, there came to his mind a line which he had often painfully followed in his copy-book at school: “The face of youth is an open book.” It did not tend at all to restore composure to his own face.

Hour by hour he found himself worse company. He had never before made such a discovery. There had been hundreds and thousands of days in his life when from dawn to dark he had been alone on the farm, in the woods, or in his fishing-boat, several miles off shore on the ocean; yet the companionship of his thoughts had been satisfactory. He had sung and whistled by the hour, recited to himself favorite bits of poetry and prose, rehearsed old stories and jokes, and enjoyed himself so well that sometimes he was annoyed rather than pleased when an acquaintance would appear and insist on diverting his attention to some trivial personal or business affair. Why could he not cheer himself now?—he who always had been the life and cheer of whatever society he found himself in?

He tried to change the current of his thoughts by looking at other people; but the result was dismal in the extreme. He lounged about Broadway, strolled in Central Park, walked down Fifth Avenue, and from most that he saw he assumed that everybody who was having a pleasant time, driving fine horses, or living in a handsome house, was rich. He had been carefully trained in the belief that “a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth,” but his observations of New York were severely straining his faith. He was entirely orthodox in his belief as to the prime source of riches, but he suddenly became conscious of an unhappy, persistent questioning as to why he also had not been born rich, or had riches thrust upon him. He understood now the mad strife for wealth which he had often heard alluded to as the prevailing sin of large cities; he wished he knew how to strive for it himself,—anywhere, in any way, if only he might always be one of the thousands of people who seemed to wear new clothes all the time, and spend their evenings in elegant society, or in the gorgeous seclusion of palaces like that occupied by Marge’s club.

For instance, there was Marge. Phil had asked Tramlay what business Marge was in, and the reply was, “None in particular: lives on his income.” What, asked Phil of himself, was the reason that such a man, who did not seem much interested in anything, should have plenty of money and nothing to do, when a certain other person, who could keenly enjoy, and, he believed, honestly improve, all of Marge’s privileges, should have been doomed to spend his life in hard endeavor to wrest the plainest food from the jealous earth and threatening sea, and have but a chance glimpse of the Paradise that the rich were enjoying,—a glimpse which probably would make his entire after-life wretched. Could he ever again be what he had so long been?—a cheerful, contented young farmer and fisherman? He actually shivered as he called up the picture of the long road, alternately dusty and muddy, that passed his father’s house, its sides of brown fence and straggling bushes and weeds converging in the distance, an uncouth human figure or a crawling horse and wagon its only sign of animation, and contrasted it with Fifth Avenue, its boundaries handsome houses and its roadway thronged with costly equipages bearing well-dressed men and beautiful women. Passing the house of a merchant prince, he saw in the window a fine bronze group on a stand; how different from the little plaster vase of wax flowers and fruits which had been visible through his mother’s “best room” window as long as he could remember!

Yes, money was the sole cause of the difference: money, or the lack of it, had cursed his father, as it now was cursing him. None of the elderly men he saw had faces more intelligent than his father, yet at that very moment the fine old man was probably clad in oft-patched trousers and cotton shirt, digging muck from a black slimy pit to enrich the thin soil of the wheat-lot. And his mother: it made his blood boil to think of her in faded calico preparing supper in the plain old kitchen at home, while scores of richly-clad women of her age, but without her alert, smiling face, were leaning back in carriages and seemingly unconscious of the blessing of being exempt from homely toil.

And, coming back to himself, money, or lack of it, would soon banish him from all that now his eye was feasting upon. It would also banish him from Lucia. He had read stories of poor young men whom wondrous chances of fortune had helped to the hands and hearts of beautiful maidens clad in fine raiment and wearing rare gems, but he never had failed to remind himself that such tales were only romances; now the memory of them seemed only to emphasize the sarcasm of destiny. Money had made between him and Lucia a gulf as wide as the ocean,—as the distance between the poles,—as——

He might have compared it with eternity, had not his eye been arrested by somebody in a carriage in the long line that was passing up the avenue. It was Lucia herself, riding with her mother. Perhaps heaven had pity on the unhappy boy, for some obstruction brought the line to a halt, and Phil, stepping from the sidewalk, found that the gulf was not too wide to be spanned, for an instant at least, by two hands.