It was he, not Patty, that made sure of the invitation and toadied to Isaac Brown, the burly old sexton of Grace Church who decided who was to sit in what pew of his sacred edifice, and who was to be invited to any affair meriting the high epithet “genteel.”
Even Ikey Brown recognized the solidity of Judge RoBards and his lady, (who had been a Jessamine) and they received their tickets to the Academy of Music and, besides, the almost royal honor of dancing in the quadrille d’honneur.
The overcrowded floor gave way with a crash and had to be rebuilt, but Patty escaped so much as the rumpling of her cherry satin train. When she was presented to the young prince, her husband fancied that he saw in those boyish eyes, so avid of beauty, a flash of homage for the graces that had not yet gone. The cinder was still fierce from the furnace.
But Patty when she was at home again wept all night. The only excuse she would give was a whimpering regret that the far-away Immy could not have been there and danced with the prince. But RoBards knew that she mourned rather the yet more remote Patty of the long ago, who was no longer present within her tight stays and her voluminous paneled brocade. She wept over the grave of herself.
The next night he understood the ravages of the years yet more keenly, for he must march as a veteran in the firemen’s parade under the dripping, smoking, bobbing torches. Five thousand marched that night, and it was his last appearance with the volunteers, whose own last days were numbered. Philadelphia and Cincinnati already had steam fire engines drawn by horses, and in a few years hired firemen would replace the old foot-runners and hand-pumpers.
As RoBards limped along on strangely flagging feet, he thought he caught a glimpse of his boy Junior and the Lasher girl at his side, standing arm in arm at the curb. But in the twinkling of an eye-lid they were gone.
Keith had marched, of course, with the Seventh, but the Sixty-ninth, made up of Irishmen, had refused to pay honor to the Sassenach prince. Its colors were taken away and it drilled no more.
When riot or parade or drill was not afoot, the aqueduct was forever haling Keith forth. For the restless town kept hewing down the hills that covered its upper regions, or cutting streets through and leaving houses perched in air. In 1840 the Water Commissioners had decided that the city would not reach Ninety-fourth Street “for a century or two”; but it was crawling thither fast.
Like sculptors who, as they carve off the clay, uncover the iron armature, the engineers were constantly disclosing anew their own deep-buried water mains and they must needs sink them still deeper. Often the pipes broke in their subterrene beds. This was like the rupture of an artery inside a man, and it required quick surgery to avert a fatal hemorrhage.
On a December midnight in 1860 two mains were rent open twenty feet below the ground at Sixty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue. The upwelling flood turned the avenue into a swamp and endangered the foundations of certain new buildings. Fortunately, they were few and unimportant so far out of town, mainly crude shacks.