1876 Read Online Free PDF Page B

day, before 8:30 a.m.
    I’ve just been counting on my fingers and my old editor at the Evening Post —who is still the editor of the paper—is now eighty-one years old. Everyone else from my New York youth is dead except for Bryant, whom I thought of even then as being the oldest person I knew.
    There   was   a welcome from my publisher,   Mr. Dutton, and a note delivered by hand from Richard Watson Gilder, editor of Scribner’s Monthly , where I publish when I cannot get a decent price elsewhere; he proposes an early meeting at my convenience; he, too, wants me to address the Lotos Club. There was nothing, however, from Bonner of the Ledger or from Frank Leslie, whose monthly pays the best of all the magazines—I had written both men that I would be in New York on the fourth.
    I was also disappointed to find no welcome from what has been for years a principal source of revenue, the New York Herald . But then young James Gordon Bennett is but a pale (and drunken) version of his father. Even so, he might have had the courtesy to have left at least a card.
    But I found what I most wanted to find amongst the telegrams: an invitation to take tea tomorrow with John Bigelow. He is the key to my good fortune ... if that fortune is to be good.
    Words now begin to blur agreeably on the page. The opiate takes effect. In spite of the night’s approach, I feel optimistic. Young. No, not young but comfortable within this carapace of old flesh as I prepare to make one last effort to place myself in such a manner that for me the setting of the sun will be the best time of my long day and Emma’s noon.

3
    NOON, and I am exhausted.
    The opiate worked marvellously until four in the morning. Then I was wide-awake. Could not fall asleep.
    I dressed. Watched the dawn. Worked for a time on my Empress Eugénie; ordered tea; made sure that the waiter was very quiet, for Emma is a light sleeper and needs all the rest she can get. New York will be a siege for her. No, a triumphant progress.
    If Mr. John Day Apgar is able to support her in decent style, then I shall be reasonably pleased to have him for a son-in-law. Of course, he is a year or two younger than Emma but that hardly matters, since her beauty should have a long life whilst he has no beauty at all.
    Emma is to spend the day with John’s sister, visiting the shops—or stores, as they call them here. Did they always? Or have I forgotten? It is plain that I am no longer a New Yorker. But then this New York is no longer the New York that was.
    Restless, the article finished and sealed in its envelope and addressed to Harper’s Monthly , I decided to take Bryant at his word and pay him a breakfast call. He lives now at 24 West Sixteenth Street.
    Without delight, I entrusted myself to the perpendicular railway. “Fine morning, sir. But near to freezing,” said the operator who looked to be, at the very least, a commodore in full uniform.
    The lobby was almost empty. I gave the envelope to a page who vowed he would deliver it to Harper’s ;then made my way amongst green shrubbery and bronze spittoons to the front door, where I was respectfully offered, as it were, the square by the uniformed chasseur, who also warned me of the cold and of the fineness of the day.
    I had forgotten the brittle, dry exhilarating cold of the New York winter. The wet cold of Paris makes my ears ache. The clammy cold of London congests the lungs. But despite the fumes of anthracite, New York’s air has a polar freshness. And everything appears new, even the sun, which this morning looked like a fresh-minted double eagle as it began its climb over the island.
    Even at such an early hour the city is very much alive with horsecars rattling up and down Fifth Avenue whilst the pedestrians—mostly the poor on their way to work—walk swiftly with their heads down, exhaling clouds of steam. Many of the beggars are Civil War veterans, wearing the remains of old uniforms; armless, legless, eyeless, they sell