They could not make sure of them; but once they ran down to the
Battery, and easily made sure of that, though not in its old aspect. They
recalled the hot morning, when they sauntered over the trodden weed that
covered the sickly grass-plots there, and sentimentalized the sweltering
paupers who had crept out of the squalid tenements about for a breath of
air after a sleepless night. Now the paupers were gone, and where the old
mansions that had fallen to their use once stood, there towered aloft and
abroad those heights and masses of many-storied brick-work for which
architecture has yet no proper form and aesthetics no name. The trees and
shrubs, all in their young spring green, blew briskly over the guarded
turf in the south wind that came up over the water; and in the well-paved
alleys the ghosts of eighteenth-century fashion might have met each other
in their old haunts, and exchanged stately congratulations upon its
vastly bettered condition, and perhaps puzzled a little over the colossal
lady on Bedloe's Island, with her lifted torch, and still more over the
curving tracks and chalet-stations of the Elevated road. It is an outlook
of unrivalled beauty across the bay, that smokes and flashes with the in
numerable stacks and sails of commerce, to the hills beyond, where the
moving forest of masts halts at the shore, and roots itself in the groves
of the many villaged uplands.
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