“Don’t you remember each other?” said Tiffles.  “Mr. Patching.  Mr. Marcus Wilkeson.”

The gentlemen shook hands, and said: 

“Oh, yes!  How do you do?  It is a fine morning.  Very.”

“So much paler than when I last saw you, that I didn’t know you, positively.  Little ill, sir?” asked Patching.  The artist was sure to observe and speak of any signs of illness on the faces of his friends and acquaintances.  Some people called him malevolent for it.

To be told that one looks pale, always makes one turn paler.  Marcus, extra sensitive on the point of looks, became quite pallid, and said, with confusion: 

“I have not been well for several days, and my rest was badly broken last night.”

Tiffles had also remarked the unusual deadly whiteness of his friend’s complexion, and the air of lassitude and unhappiness which pervaded his face, but he would not have alluded to them for the world.  He never made impertinent observations of that sort.

“Unwell?” said Tiffles.  “I had not noticed it.  In the morning, all New York looks as if it had just come out of a debauch.  Wilkeson will pass, I guess.”  This calumny upon the city was Tiffles’s favorite bit of satire, and it had cheered up many a poor fellow who thought himself looking uncommonly haggard.

Marcus smiled languidly, and turned away his head with a sigh.  As his eyes swept about, they encountered the gaze of the man in citizen’s clothes, previously noticed.  At first, Marcus thought he had seen this man somewhere before; and then he thought he was mistaken.  The man evinced no recognition of Marcus, and, an instant after, his sharp glance wandered to some other person in the large group waiting for the boat.

Here the boat came into the slip, and, after bumping in an uncertain way against the piles on either side, neared almost within leaping distance of the wharf.  A solid crowd of passengers stood at the edge of the boat, with their eyes fixed on the landing place, as if it were the soil of a new world upon which they were to leap for the first time, like a party of Columbuses When the distance had been diminished to about four feet, the front row of passengers jumped ashore, and rushed wildly up the street, as if impelled by a rocket-like power from behind.  These people could not have been more eager to get ashore, if they had come from the other side of the globe on business involving a million apiece, to be transacted on that day only.

In fact, they were only lawyers, tradesmen, mechanics, and clerks, living in Jersey City, and going over to New York on their daily, humdrum business.  It was not the business that attracted them, but the demon of American restlessness that pushed them on.  They went back at night in just the same hurry, and made equally hazardous jumps on the Jersey side.  They were mere shuttlecocks between the battledoors of Jersey City and New York.