confidence in the senses obstinately refuting the theory.

About half-way between end and end of Nassau street stands a row of what
were modest dwelling-houses in the remote days when the city was under
the rule of the Americans, but are now only so many floors of law
offices. Who owns them is not known; for proprietors of real-estate in
this extraordinary highway of antiquity are never mentioned in public
like owners in any other street; but they are shabby, dreary,
hopeless-looking old piles, suggestive of having, perhaps, been hurried
and tumbled through musty law-suits scores of times, and occupied at
last by the robber Law itself for costs. On a certain dark, foggy
afternoon in December, one of the seediest of the fallen brick
brotherhood presented a particularly dingy appearance, as the gas-lights
necessitated by the premature gloom of the hour gleamed dimly through a
blearing window-pane here and there. The house still retained the narrow
street-door, hall-way, and abrupt immediate stairway of its earlier
days; and had, too, the old-style goodly single brown stone for a
"stoop," along the front fall of which, in faded white block letters, as
though originally done with a stencil-plate, appeared the strange
device:

S--T--1860--X.

Whether this curious legend referred to the sweets or bitters of the
tenement's various experiences; whether it meant Subjected To 1860
'Xecutions, or Sacrificed to 1860 'Xecutors, or Sentenced to Wait e'en
Sixty 'Xigencies, did not bother the head of Mr. DIBBLE, who came in
from Gowanus every morning to occupy his law-office up-stairs, and was
sitting thoughtfully therein, before a grate fire, on the dull, wintry
afternoon in question.