cave-like offices in its cliff-like walls begin to empty themselves,
when the overlords and their lieutenants close their desks and turn
their faces homewards, leaving the details of the day's routine to be
wound up by underlings. In the clear light of the late spring afternoon
a stream of humanity was high and fluent upon the sidewalks. Duncan had
glimpses of keen-faced men, bright-faced women, eager boys, quickened
all by that manner of efficiency and intelligence which seems so
integrally American. A well-dressed throng, well-fed, amiable and
animated, looking ever forward, the resistless tide of affairs that
gave it being bore it onward; it passed the onlooker as a strong
current passes flotsam in a back-eddy, with no pause, no turning aside.
Acutely he felt his aloofness from it, who had no part in its interests
and scarcely any comprehension of them. The sunken look, the leanness
of his young face, seemed suddenly accentuated; the gloom in his
discontented eyes deepened; his slight habitual stoop became more
noticeable. And a second time he nodded acquiescence to his unspoken
thought.

"There," said he, singling out a passer-by upon whose complacent
features prosperity had set its smug hall-mark--"there, but for the
grace of God, goes Nat Duncan!" He rolled the paraphrase upon his
tongue and found it bitter--not, however, with a tonic bitterness.
"Lord, what a worthless critter I am! No good to myself--nor to anybody
else. Even on Harry I'm a drag--a regular old man of the mountains!"

Despondently he went down to the sidewalk and merged himself with the
crowd, moving with it though a thousand miles apart from it, and
presently diverging, struck across-town toward the Worth Street subway
station.