is a vast, indistinguishable wilderness of flitting human shapes, not one of which takes half so much notice of you as a wild bush would.  Speak to one; it answers without the slightest emotion, and passes on.  Your presence is absolutely no more to any soul of them, provided they have souls, than if you were so much perfectly familiar granite.  You feel, that, with such attention as you receive, such curiosity as you excite, you must be there hundreds of years to be either recognized or missed.

Had you been a stranger in Boston, one moist and rather showery summer-evening, not a year after the events we have narrated, you might have been recovered from the sense of loneliness we have described by observing one pretty female figure hurrying along the crowded sidewalk with a very large and replete satchel, and without any of the sang-froid which characterizes city pedestrianism.  You might have noticed that this one human being, like yourself, was evidently not at home.  Every glare of gas-light revealed a deeply-flushed face, eyes that had been weeping and which were now flashing with a wild earnestness and an altogether preternatural resolution.  A gazelle, started by the huntsman’s pack, could not have thrown more piercing glances at every avenue of escape than this excited girl did at every cross street, and indeed at everything but the human faces that passed her.  All of them she shunned, with a look that seemed equally anxious to avoid the known and the unknown.  She should seem to have narrowly escaped some peril, and was carrying with her a secret not to be confided to friend or stranger, certainly not to either without due consideration.  Had you watched her, as the crowds of people, returning from the various evening amusements, died away in the streets, you would have seen the deep color of her cheeks die away also to deadly paleness; had you been sufficiently clairvoyant, you might have seen how two charming rows of pearls bit the blanched lips till the runaway blood came back into the sad gashes, how the tears welled up again, and with them came relief and fresh strength just as she was about to faint and drop in the street.  Then returned again the throb of indignant resolution, as her mind recurred to the attempted ruin of her paradise by a disguised foe; then succeeded shame and dread lest the friends she had left in her childhood’s rural home should know how differently from her fond anticipations had turned out the first week of her sojourn in the great city.  She was most thoroughly resolved, that, if possible, they should not know anything of the wreck of her long-cherished hopes till she had found some foothold for new ones.  She felt that she was a Yankee girl in the metropolis of New England, with wit, skill, and endurance equal to any employment that ever falls to the lot of Yankee women; but having given up the only chance which had ever opened to her, how could she find another?  Were she of the other sex, or only disguised in the outer integuments of it, with the trifling sum in her purse, she would get lodgings at the next hotel, and seek suitable employment without suspicion.  In the wide wilderness of a city there was not an acquaintance she did not dread to meet, in her present circumstances, even worse than death itself, or, what is next door to it, a police-station.