To the provincial coming to New York for the first time, ignorant and unknown, the city presents a notable mingling of the qualities of cheeriness and gloom.  If he have any eye at all for the beautiful, he cannot help experiencing a thrill as he crosses the ferry over the river filled with plying craft and catches the first sight of the spires and buildings of New York.  If he have the right stuff in him, a something will take possession of him that will grip him again every time he returns to the scene and will make him long and hunger for the place when he is away from it.  Later, the lights in the busy streets will bewilder and entice him.  He will feel shy and helpless amid the hurrying crowds.  A new emotion will take his heart as the people hasten by him,—­a feeling of loneliness, almost of grief, that with all of these souls about him he knows not one and not one of them cares for him.  After a while he will find a place and give a sigh of relief as he settles away from the city’s sights behind his cosey blinds.  It is better here, and the city is cruel and cold and unfeeling.  This he will feel, perhaps, for the first half-hour, and then he will be out in it all again.  He will be glad to strike elbows with the bustling mob and be happy at their indifference to him, so that he may look at them and study them.  After it is all over, after he has passed through the first pangs of strangeness and homesickness, yes, even after he has got beyond the stranger’s enthusiasm for the metropolis, the real fever of love for the place will begin to take hold upon him.  The subtle, insidious wine of New York will begin to intoxicate him.  Then, if he be wise, he will go away, any place,—­yes, he will even go over to Jersey.  But if he be a fool, he will stay and stay on until the town becomes all in all to him; until the very streets are his chums and certain buildings and corners his best friends.  Then he is hopeless, and to live elsewhere would be death.  The Bowery will be his romance, Broadway his lyric, and the Park his pastoral, the river and the glory of it all his epic, and he will look down pityingly on all the rest of humanity.

It was the afternoon of a clear October day that the Hamiltons reached New York.  Fannie had some misgivings about crossing the ferry, but once on the boat these gave way to speculations as to what they should find on the other side.  With the eagerness of youth to take in new impressions, Joe and Kitty were more concerned with what they saw about them than with what their future would hold, though they might well have stopped to ask some such questions.  In all the great city they knew absolutely no one, and had no idea which way to go to find a stopping-place.