"Fourteenth Street," said one lamp-post, "University Place" another. Yes, the park opposite was Union Square, but where was the house on whose porch he had stood that April day in eighteen sixty-five when the procession swung around from Broadway?
A business building covered with signs replaced it; yet at the same moment, his eyes fell on what he sought. The statue of Lincoln, rugged and majestic, standing above the cobbled plateau, calm and unmoved by all the frantic bustle of the street.
Making his way carefully through the traffic, Gilbert approached the rail about the statue. He paused for a moment, and then, undoing his parcel, took from it the wreath, rested it on the railing, while he folded the paper and, winding the string about it, placed it in his pocket. Then getting stiffly over the barrier, he laid the wreath at Lincoln's feet, raised his old hat, looking up into Lincoln's face as one in perfect, if humble, comradeship, while his lips murmured, "Through you I have finished the course, with you I have kept the faith!"
The people of the street, big and little, loafer and gamin, who spring up about an unusual object as swiftly as the circles surround a stone flung in the water, neither jostled nor jeered nor plucked the wreath away, for among the simple-minded, hero-worship will never die out save for lack of heroes.
Then making his way back to Fifth Avenue, Gilbert, seeking the scanty bits of shade as best he might, walked up its length until he reached the third open space and turned eastward to the railway station.
At the coming of the evening mail he pottered as usual with the letters as though that day had been like all the others, and ate his supper with little sauce of conversation, to the inexpressible disappointment of Satira Potts.
CHAPTER XX
ON THE WINGS OF THE MORNING
During the remainder of the summer the village of Harley's Mills went into a sort of chrysalis state as befitted its coming change of name. The fact that the Felton house had ceased to exist as a social centre and that many of the Quality Hill folk had gone abroad added considerably to its somnolence. Some of what are generally referred to by the local press as "leading citizens" had under construction a brick block on the Westboro side of the blacksmith shop in which the chief trade interests of the place were to be sheltered, including the new post-office.