Cynthia will always remember the awe with which that first view of New York inspired her, and Ephraim confessed that he, too, had felt it, when he had first seen the myriad lights of the city after the long, dusty ride from the hills with his regiment.  For all the flags and bunting it had held in ’61, Ephraim thought that city crueller than war itself.  And Cynthia thought so too, as she clung to Jethro’s arm between the carriages and the clanging street-cars, and looked upon the riches and poverty around her.  There entered her soul that night a sense of that which is the worst cruelty of all—­the cruelty of selfishness.  Every man going his own pace, seeking to gratify his own aims and desires, unconscious and heedless of the want with which he rubs elbows.  Her natural imagination enhanced by her life among the hills, the girl peopled the place in the street lights with all kinds of strange evil-doers of whose sins she knew nothing, adventurers, charlatans, alert cormorants, who preyed upon the unwary.  She shrank closer to Ephraim from a perfumed lady who sat next to her in the car, and was thankful when at last they found themselves in the corridor of the Astor House standing before the desk.

Hotel clerks, especially city ones, are supernatural persons.  This one knew Jethro, greeted him deferentially as Judge Bass, and dipped the pen in the ink and handed it to him that he might register.  By half-past nine Cynthia was dreaming of Lem Hallowell and Coniston, and Lem was driving a yellow street-car full of queer people down the road to Brampton.

There were few guests in the great dining room when they breakfasted at seven the next morning.  New York, in the sunlight, had taken on a more kindly expression, and those who were near by smiled at them and seemed full of good-will.  Persons smiled at them that day as they walked the streets or stood spellbound before the shop windows, and some who saw them felt a lump rise in their throats at the memories they aroused of forgotten days:  the three seemed to bring the very air of the hills with them into that teeming place, and many who, had come to the city with high hopes, now in the shackles of drudgery; looked after them.  They were a curious party, indeed:  the straight, dark girl with the light in her eyes and the color in her cheeks; the quaint, rugged figure of the elderly man in his swallow-tail and brass buttons and square-toed, country boots; and the old soldier hobbling along with the aid of his green umbrella, clad in the blue he had loved and suffered for.  Had they remained until Sunday, they might have read an amusing account of their visit,—­of Jethro’s suppers of crackers and milk at the Astor House, of their progress along Broadway.  The story was not lacking in pathos, either, and in real human feeling, for the young reporter who wrote it had come, not many years before, from the hills himself.  But by that time they had accomplished another marvellous span in their journey, and were come to Washington itself.