He knelt with one knee on the couch and peered out.

"Dear me," he said, "I fancy I used to skate as a boy on a pond just
about where that factory is now."

He found she knew very little about the history of New York. She had
been brought up abroad, she said; her father had been a consul in
France. It was a subject which he liked to expound. He loved his native
city, which he with his own eyes had seen once as hardly more than a
village. He and his ancestors--and Mr. Lanley's sense of identification
with his ancestors was almost Chinese--had watched and had a little
shaped the growth.

"I suppose you had Dutch ancestry, then," she said, trying to take
an interest.

"Dutch." Mr. Lanley shut his eyes, resolving, since he had no idea what
her own descent might be, that he would not explain to her the superior
attitude of the English settlers of the eighteenth century toward their
Dutch predecessors. However, perhaps he did not entirely conceal his
feeling, for he said: "No, I have no Dutch blood--not a drop. Very good
people in their way, industrious--peasants." He hurried on to the great
fire of 1835. "Swept between Wall Street and Coenties Slip," he said,
with a splendid gesture, and then discovered that she had, never heard of
"Quenches Slip," or worse, she had pronounced it as it was spelled. He
gently set her right there. His father had often told him that he had
seen with his own eyes a note of hand which had been blown, during the
course of the conflagration, as far as Flatbush. And the second fire of
1845. His father had been a man then, married, a prominent citizen, old
enough, as Mr. Lanley said, with a faint smile, to have lost heavily. He