remission of sins had been symbolized by the bombs and scaffolds of Chicago, and the hearts of those who felt the wrongs bound up with our rights, the slavery implicated in our liberty, were thrilling with griefs and hopes hitherto strange to the average American breast.  Opportunely for me there was a great street-car strike in New York, and the story began to find its way to issues nobler and larger than those of the love-affairs common to fiction.  I was in my fifty-second year when I took it up, and in the prime, such as it was, of my powers.  The scene which I had chosen appealed prodigiously to me, and the action passed as nearly without my conscious agency as I ever allow myself to think such things happen.

The opening chapters were written in a fine, old fashioned apartment house which had once been a family house, and in an uppermost room of which I could look from my work across the trees of the little park in Stuyvesant Square to the towers of St. George’s Church.  Then later in the spring of 1889 the unfinished novel was carried to a country house on the Belmont border of Cambridge.  There I must have written very rapidly to have pressed it to conclusion before the summer ended.  It came, indeed, so easily from the pen that I had the misgiving which I always have of things which do not cost me great trouble.

There is nothing in the book with which I amused myself more than the house-hunting of the Marches when they were placing themselves in New York; and if the contemporary reader should turn for instruction to the pages in which their experience is detailed I assure him that he may trust their fidelity and accuracy in the article of New York housing as it was early in the last decade of the last century:  I mean, the housing of people of such moderate means as the Marches.  In my zeal for truth I did not distinguish between reality and actuality in this or other matters—­that is, one was as precious to me as the other.  But the types here portrayed are as true as ever they were, though the world in which they were finding their habitat is wonderfully, almost incredibly different.  Yet it is not wholly different, for a young literary pair now adventuring in New York might easily parallel the experience of the Marches with their own, if not for so little money; many phases of New York housing are better, but all are dearer.  Other aspects of the material city have undergone a transformation much more wonderful.  I find that in my book its population is once modestly spoken of as two millions, but now in twenty years it is twice as great, and the grandeur as well as grandiosity of its forms is doubly apparent.  The transitional public that then moped about in mildly tinkling horse-cars is now hurried back and forth in clanging trolleys, in honking and whirring motors; the Elevated road which was the last word of speed is undermined by the Subway, shooting its swift shuttles through the subterranean woof of the city’s haste.  From these feet let the witness infer our whole massive Hercules, a bulk that sprawls and stretches beyond the rivers through the tunnels piercing their beds and that towers into the skies with innumerable tops—­a Hercules blent of Briareus and Cerberus, but not so bad a monster as it seemed then to threaten becoming.