He stood on a balcony in the Broadway, with his family, Madison, Baron Steuben, and the Schuylers, bowing constantly to the salutes and cheers.  Nicolas Cruger looked up and grinned.  Fish winked decorously, and Troup attempted a salaam, and nearly dropped the Constitution.  But Hamilton’s mind served him a trick for a moment; the vivid procession, with his face and name fluttering above five thousand heads, the compact mass of spectators, proud and humble, that crowded the pavements and waved their handkerchiefs toward him, the patriotically decorated windows filled with eager, often beautiful, faces, disappeared, and he stood in front of Cruger’s store on Bay Street, with his hands in his linen pockets, gazing out over a blinding glare of water, passionately wishing for the war-ship which never came, to deliver him from his Island prison and carry him to the gates of the real world beyond.  He had been an ambitious boy, but nothing in his imaginings had projected him to the dizzy eminence on which he stood to-day.  He was recalled by the salute of the Federal ship’s thirteen guns to the president of the Congress and its members, who stood on the fort in the Battery.

After all, perhaps it was the proudest and the happiest day of his career, for the depths in his nature still slumbered, the triumph was without alloy; and he knew that there were other heights to scale, and that he should scale them.  It was the magnificent and spontaneous tribute of an intelligent people to an enlightened patriotism, to years of severe and unselfish thought; and hardly an enemy grudged him his deserts.  The wild feeling of exultant triumph which surged behind his smiling face receded before the rising swell of the profoundest gratitude he had ever known.

The day finished with a great banquet at Mr. Bayard’s country-seat, near Grand Street, where tables were spread for six thousand persons, in a pavilion surmounted by an image of Fame, and decorated with the colours of the nations that had formed treaties with the United States.  Later, there was a grand display of fireworks.

XI

On the following day Hamilton went to Albany to march at the head of a Federal procession with General Schuyler, then returned to “Hamiltonopolis” and such legal work as he was permitted to accomplish; for not only were leaders consulting him on every possible question from the coming elections to the proper seat for the new government, and his duties as a member of Congress pressing, but Edward Stevens, now established as a doctor in Philadelphia, paid him a visit of a week, and they talked the night through of St. Croix and old times.  One of the pleasantest results of these years of supremacy was the unqualified delight of his Island friends.  Hugh Knox was so proud of him, and of himself and the debt which Hamilton acknowledged, that he wrote explosive reams describing the breathless interest of St. Croix in his career,