“I am very happy,” said he to himself, “that Mary has so easily consented to this scheme of mine. I have long seen that her patient grief was wearing her away. Now, perhaps, if I can provide her a new object of interest, and love, she will recover tone. Man can work; but woman is in danger of brooding.”
And so, with his busy brain full of schemes for his wife’s happiness, full of schemes for comforting , and helping all the people he knew who needed help and comfort, full of schemes for bringing the great powers and untiring energies he was conscious of to bear, to ease, speed, and better the world. Brightly hastened down Broadway.
The early clerks, seeing him pass, a knot an hour faster than they were travelling, nudged each other and said: “Hallo, there’s Brightly! Early bird! No wonder he’s making his fortune quicker than any man in Wall Street, lucky fellow!”
As everybody is aware, one end of Wall Street drowns itself in a river lately from Hellgate, the other end terminates in a church, and runs up a spire into heaven. Or it might be said that Wall Street, like many a man’s career, begins with the sign of the cross up in the pure sky, tumbles down away from the church as fast as it can, and then rushes up hill and down, with Mammon on both sides of the way, until it suddenly finds itself plumped into a tide that is making full speed for Hellgate.
That ornate and flowery plant, the spire of Trinity, with its tap-root in a graveyard and its long
