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She had not walked far, when a sudden turn brought
her where the road plunged down with a swift declivity
at her feet. She stopped and trembled. Underneath
her troubled eye lay the mighty metropolis, with
its thousand chimnies, its blackened roofs, its solemn
church-turrets and glittering vanes—spreading out whereever
she gazed, and filling her mind with an indescribable
awe.

How dark, how cold and chill, seemed that multitude
of houses to her! They suggested to her no thoughts of
neighborhood and fellowship by their closeness, but rather
one of dumb creatures huddled together by sheer necessity,
to shut off the shivering airs that beset them from
the rivers on either side. When she looked for broad and
cheerful ways, and found only narrow streets that yawned
like chasms and abysses along the house-fronts; when
her eyes sought waving trees to gladden the air, in vain;
her heart shrunk within her: it seemed to her a wilderness
of dungeons, and nothing more. A dark dismal mist,
formed of dust, smoke, the reek of squalid streets, the
breath of thousands and hundred thousands of human
beings—crept, like a black surge, along the house-tops.

The hoarse murmur deepened as night drew on; the
moaning of one vexed with pain and confinement, of
prisoners pining to be free. If the whole broad shadow
of the city, cold and vast, had fallen on her spirit, it could
not have chilled her more: but when the thought came
to her again of the sacred errand on which she was bound,
her heart was renewed, her eye brightened, and clasping
her burden anew, she hurried on. And now the great
city which she had wondered at, in its entirety and vastness,
met her, part by part, and bewildered her with its
countless details. There were country waggons hurrying
out: sulkies, stanhopes, baronches flying past as if desolation
followed fast behind; then great carts and trucks,
loaded to the peak with heavy merchandize. All these
she regarded with a wandering eye; but when she caught
sight of dark foundation-stones, still clinging to the earth,

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where an old penitentiary had been lately razed to the
ground—she felt the uses it had served.

Whenever she passed houses with closed shutters, she
shuddered and quickened her pace; to some there were
barred windows — these she regarded with a sidelong
glance of curiosity, as if she expected to see pale faces
peering out between the irons. Once she passed an old
stone-building, with every casement from cellar to garret
closely ironed; it was only an old sugar-house, and she
speeded past it as if it had been a jail.

Full of vague fears, startled at every object that crossed
her, suggestive in any, the remotest degree, of that she
dreaded—and had good cause to dread the most—she
hastened on. A green waggon, close and dark, passed
her—the prison carriage, plying between the city prison
and the Island—and she felt it like a cloud as it hurried
by. The very streets, murky as they were, seemed to close
upon her in the distance, but opened again constantly as
she advanced; new houses, new sights and objects, springing
as from a perpetual womb, out of the cloudy haze that
lowered in her way. As far as her eye could pierce, the
roads were dark with vehicles of one sort and another,
crossing and re-crossing, rushing tumultuously in every
direction; some driven by boys, some by men; some sitting
under shelter, others, the cartmen, standing up in
their professional frocks, with a firm hold upon the reins,
darting rapidly from one side of the street to the other.
Above the whole throng and procession, a great coach or
stage at times towered up, over-topping the street, and
swarming to its very summit with passengers.

All along the way, people poured into the streets in
uninterrupted succession, out of damp, dull rooms; out
of narrow alleys; from work-shops; from cellars; from
churches; and the way was perpetually choked and
glutted with the throng. What multitudes went past
pent up in carriages—a pleasure to them, a hideous
bondage, it seemed to her!

She saw no one, not one, with gyves and irons on their
limbs, and yet how care-worn, and bowed, and convictlike
they all looked to her!

She passed along, looking anxiously at dark door-ways,
at iron gates and steep areas, and heavy churches oppressing
the earth with their massive granite or marble;

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smithies, where men were busy forging vast chains and
cables; shops, where great locks and bolts leaned in the
windows. A long way after all these, she came upon a
grim, ill-dressed, smoke-stained man, who bore in his
hand a bunch of keys, which he grasped close and
clashed together as he walked, and she shrunk from him
as if he had been the deadliest and fastest of all the jailer
race. Gazing fearfully about in this way, she espied, far
off, through a side-street, dimly seen moving through the
dusk, that grew every minute deeper, a hearse and funeral
train—at that distance it seemed scarcely more than a
shadow—and a cold shudder crept through her frame.
What if it were her friend, her dear friend, whose burial
she thus regarded? Her first impulse was to hasten after
it; but ere she had taken many steps in this resolution
it had glided away, and she returned to the path she had
been pursuing. Night now came swiftly on; the black
shadows fell in broad masses in the streets; the confusion,
the hurry, the press of life in every direction deepened.

She moved along as speedily as she could, consulting
from time to time at a window lamp, a chart she had
borne in her hand all along. At intervals, as if by chance
and no design, a public light broke out, sometimes in one
quarter, sometimes in another, and glimmered with a
feeble ray. This only made the gloom deeper and
drearier than before; and she kept, while she could, in
the streets where the shop windows blazed upon the
pavement.

It was not easy for her, with all her care, her painful
scrutiny of the paper she carried, and study of the sign-boards
at the corners, to shape her course aright. There
was a street-fight once; then a crowd gathered at the door
of a show; then a poor woman who was doling forth from
the steps of a gentleman's domicil, a piteous tale of poverty
and suffering. Once there was a hideous cry, a light rose
high in the air, and she looked about and saw more plainly
than ever how darkness had stretched his mighty arms
abroad and held the city in his grasp.

Not a whit fairer or freer did the houses show to her
now at night, than when she first beheld them and ever
since; they all seemed like graves or tombs, or prison-fastnesses.
Striking through thoroughfares that diverged
from the main path she had been traveling, she was

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gradually approaching the point she sought. She passed a
thoroughfare, little frequented, where the unfed lamps
winked and blinked at each other across the street, like
so many decayed ghosts. Then another, where all the
lights had gone out. Then others, until at length, by
what she saw around, she felt that the object of her wish
was near at hand.

There was a square, so her chart informed her, here it
was; a discolored yellow house—here, too, only it seemed
more golden and precious than the description allowed:
and there, yes there, where her eyes were fixed, as on
a star, shone a little light, just at the height she might
have looked for. The house, the home, the shelter of
her sick friend was found. The door stood open to receive
and welcome her in. She looked around, the tall houses
that guarded the square growing blacker every minute,
seemed frowning on her and gathering about her, closer
and closer, as if they would shut her in: she glanced
timidly up to them, as if they had been in truth cruel
living creatures, and trembling with fear and joy, fled
into the house for shelter, like one pursued.