"There he is now!" Smith once suddenly remarked, as they turned a corner and found themselves almost in the arms of an exceptionally spirited cigar-store figure.
"Who?" Helen had asked in surprise.
"Why, old Peter Minuit himself, in the very act of reaching for the proceeds," Smith explained. For which piece of simple levity it is to be feared that he was neither properly ashamed nor adequately rebuked.
It was in the old city, below Twenty-third Street, that the work of time had been most diverse. Here four full eras had left their mark—the aboriginal, the early Dutch, the English-American, and lastly the modern age of granite canyons and sky-seeking towers and marvels of high air and below ground. Smith knew all four, and if one knows where to search, there are plenty of interesting relics of the first three still to be found. He knew how the southern end of Manhattan looked when Hendrick Hudson moored the Half Moon in the lower harbor; and where the shore line lay when the old Dutch keels with their high poops and proud pennons rode at anchor in the river; and again later on when the English flag had replaced the Dutch, and the towering masts of frigates and brigs and schooners made with their threaded rigging a constant etching of the water front.
He guided Helen through old streets where a century's relics still persisted and where one could still find an occasional cornerstone which the flight of a hundred hurrying years had not displaced. He was familiar with most of the old street names,—how West Broadway was once Chapel Street,—many of them long since abandoned for modern changelings far less effective. For the first time Helen realized the origin of the name of "Bouwerie," and how far into New York's and the nation's traditions reached some of the mossy gravestones in Trinity Churchyard.
The city, during the progress of the Civil War, of which Helen had heard Augustus Lispenard speak, was clearer in her vision than ever before, for Smith's grandfather had marched down Broadway in '61, and, unlike Mr. Lispenard, he had not come back.
"They were just starting Central Park," Smith said; "because I have heard mother say often that her father's letters from the front asked several times how the Park was getting along."
"It seems odd, doesn't it? I had always looked on the Park as something which must always have been where it is," Miss Maitland commented. "But I suppose there must have been a beginning some time."
Now all these wanderings and this companionship could not go wholly for naught. Smith was not at all a sentimental person, and Miss Maitland was not in search of emotional adventure, but they were on hazardous ground, and it was hazardous because it was very pleasant to them both.
Miss Mary Wardrop was a lady in whom discretion was held in but lukewarm esteem. Had this not been so, she would have doubtless interposed, for convention's sake at least, in the swiftly developing friendship between her niece and this young insurance man. But Miss Wardrop had long since ceased to care what the world said, and her satisfaction with her own views was sufficient to permit her ignoring those who disagreed with them. She saw nothing objectionable in Smith, and if she speculated on the affair at all, she probably reflected that Miss Maitland was now twenty-five years old and if she didn't know her own mind at that age, it didn't much matter what happened to her.