THE SUNLIGHT THAT MADE A SHIMMERING AUREOLE ABOUT HER FLASHED IN HER EYES, SHINING WITH THE TEARS OF RAPTURE
The Marquis of Waterford had made himself notorious with his riotous gayety and his clashes with the night watchmen, the Leatherheads. A fifty-year-old veteran of Waterloo had married a sixteen-year-old heiress in a boarding school secretly and had received enormous attention from the newspapers.
Fanny Elssler had danced herself into the favor of the people and the horror of the pulpit. Daniel Webster had thundered for the Whigs. The streets had roared with the campaign cry of “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too.” Hard cider had become a slogan and log cabins a symbol. A log cabin had been built at Harrison’s, a few miles from Tuliptree Farm. It served later as a schoolhouse. Then President Harrison died of indigestion a month after his inauguration.
The hard times grew harder and harder. The inpour of foreign immigrants increased till New York became almost a foreign city. The Native-Americans anxiously formed a party and their nominee received all of seventy-seven votes; he was a painter named S. F. B. Morse who had invented a curious toy he called the telegraph. He wanted Congress to help him stretch a wire from Washington to Baltimore for him to play with.
The churches started an hegira uptown. One of them was set out as far as Tenth Street on Fifth Avenue, which had recently been opened through the farms beyond Washington Square. A mission had been established in the foreign world of the Five Points, where it amused the populace of the brothels and crime cellars.
Crime increased and flourished appallingly and the newspapers were unfit for the home. The murderer Colt, having cut up the body of his victim, salted it, and shipped it to New Orleans; was caught, tried, and convicted; then, having married a foolish woman in his cell, stabbed himself to death and died while the guards of the Tombs fought a fire of mysterious origin.
The “beautiful cigar girl” furnished another mystery and an excuse for revolting journalism. RoBards had bought tobacco of her during his exile in town and had watched with sardonic disdain the wily smiles she passed across the counter to her customers who came more for flirtation than for weeds. One day she vanished and after a time her body was found drifting in the river near the Sibyl’s Cave in the beautiful Elysian Fields at Hoboken. She had evidently fought a desperate battle with her murderer, but had been flung bruised and beaten into the water. Her murderer was never discovered. People said he was a naval officer, but they could not prove it.
One of the cheap and popular newspaper men named Edgar Allan Poe made an ephemeral mystery story out of it. It was exciting but, of course, not literature. His name was never included in the list of dignified authors whom the defenders of American art compiled to prove to the English critics that good writing was possible on this side of the Atlantic.
Dr. Lardner came over from England and proved conclusively that steam was impracticable for crossing the ocean. Shortly afterward a steamer brought across the popular English serial writer, Charles Dickens, and the people lavished on him attentions which he rewarded with infuriating contempt. Captain Marryat and other Englishmen, and women like Mrs. Trollope, began a book bombardment against the pride of the new republic, and roused it to fury.