Lockport, New York

“ It makes New York seem inhospitable. It makes Chicago seem like home. Still, as David Lockwin seeks his hotel, noting always the complete solitude in which he dwells among the vast crowds that once knew him familiarly or by sight, it chills him to the marrow. ”

“ BEFORE THE TELEGRAPH OFFICE
Robert Chalmers is in Chicago this morning of the dedication, and has slept well. He tossed in his bed at New York. He snores at the Western inn.
He asks himself why this is so, and his logic tells him that nature hopes to re-establish him as David Lockwin. There is a programme in such a course. At New York there was neither chart nor compass. It was like the Africa in mid-sea, foundering.
Now Robert Chalmers is nearing land. And the land is David Lockwin. The welcoming shore is the old life of respectability. Banish the difficulties! They will evaporate. ”

“ When I recognized you all, I just butted in. New York is a lonesome place for a stranger. Hope you don't mind my joining you."
"Not at all!" he was assured.
When he came to pay the waiter he displayed a roll of yellow-backed bills that caused Anthony to caution him:
"If I were you I'd put that in my shoe. I know this place."
Locke only laughed. "There's more where this came from. However, that's one reason I'd like to stick around with you fellows. I have an idea I've been followed, and I don't care to be tapped on the head. ”

“ Lockhart's little cottage is half a mile north of Crosbyside, and near the high bluff which Mr. Charles O'Conor, the distinguished lawyer of New York city, presented to the Paulist Fathers, whose establishment is on Fifty-ninth Street in that metropolis. Here the members of the new Order come to pass their summer vacations, bringing with them their theological students. The Paulists are hard workers, visiting and holding "missions" in Minnesota, California, and other parts of the United States. ”

“ They were great sportsmen, and whenever they could get away from the law office they would go off shooting. I think they were fonder of each other than brothers even. I've heard Mr. Lockwood tell of the days they lay in the rushes along the Chesapeake Bay waiting for duck. He has said often that they were the happiest hours of his life. That was their greatest pleasure, going off together after duck or snipe along the Maryland waters. Well, they grew rich and began to know people; and then they met a girl. It seems they both thought a great deal of her, as half the New York men did, I am told ”

“ Between Chicago and New York one may fall into a wide abyss of despair. The late Honorable David Lockwin has tarried in Chicago, has assisted at the public dedication of his own cenotaph, has visited the David Lockwin Annex, has looked his own widow in the face. His pride is torn out by the roots. A man once exalted is now humbled. And, added to the horrors of his situation, every fiber of his body, every aspiration of his spirit, proclaims his love of the woman who once wearied him. ”

“ He was too poor to practise at once, and went into newspaper work to make a living. After leaving the Sun he was elected district attorney of Greene County, and in 1843 was appointed master of chancery in New York. He left the Democratic party when the Republican party was organized, but returned to his old political allegiance after the Civil War. In 1876 he was elected Governor of New York—an achievement which still left him a little less famous than his fellow reporter, Locke. ”

“ Everything he writes is a model in its peculiar way, serving just the purposes intended and nothing to spare.
The Sun’s new writer was a collateral descendant of John Locke, the English philosopher of the seventeenth century. He was born in 1800, but his birthplace was not New York, as his contemporary biographers wrote. It was East Brent, Somersetshire, England. His early American friends concealed this fact when writing of Locke, for they feared that his English birth (all the wounds of war had not healed) would keep him out of some of the literary clubs. ”

“ Oh, I’m from Oshkosh; but I have a branch house in New York too. I go down just once a year to sell live stock, and I pick up more names in the week I stay there than an ordinary man can remember, and I remember all their given names, and I can reel them off just as fast as any Indiana young man I ever met, and I know them just as well. Only I prefer financiers and statesmen to horse men, actors and prize fighters. I am very select. Next year I shall not know anybody under a senator. You may just as well know big men, really great men, as merely notorious ones. ”

“ Let me be forgotten!’ Locksley would reply, ‘Very well, sir!’ And you would be as secluded as if you had gone to Kamtschatka.”
“You speak as if such things happened in Chrysalis.”
“They might, under Locksley.”
“How refreshing,” said I, “to find such a place and such a person plump in the middle of New York! But tell me, what is Locksley to Towner?”
“Towner married our janitor’s wife’s sister. Locksley is a very clever machinist. He was a prosperous locksmith, manufacturing locks of a patent of his own, until Towner persuaded him to indorse his paper. ”

“ Lockport is served by the Chicago & Alton, and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé railways, and by the Chicago & Joliet Electric railway. It is in a picturesque farming country, and there are good limestone quarries in the valley of the Des Plaines river. It has manufactures and a considerable trade, especially in grain. ”

“ So instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering blackness and ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had ever dared to breathe before—the unwhisperable secret of secrets—the fact that this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life. ”

“ Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living ever since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite copings and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street within five minutes’ walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days (from the social point of view) about 1820. ”

“ New York City is the most fatally fascinating thing in America. She sits like a great witch at the gate of the country, showing her alluring white face and hiding her crooked hands and feet under the folds of her wide garments—constantly enticing thousands from far within, and tempting those who come from across the seas to go no farther. And all these become the victims of her caprice. Some she at once crushes beneath her cruel feet; others she condemns to a fate like that of galley slaves; a few she favors and fondles, riding them high on the bubbles of fortune; ”

“ Naturally desiring to represent in the most favourable colours the world from which I came, I touched but slightly, though indulgently, on the antiquated and decaying institutions of Europe, in order to expatiate on the present grandeur and prospective pre-eminence of that glorious American Republic, in which Europe enviously seeks its model and tremblingly foresees its doom. Selecting for an example of the social life of the United States that city in which progress advances at the fastest rate, I indulged in an animated description of the moral habits of New York. ”

“ Almond lived much farther up town, in an embryonic street with a high number—a region where the extension of the city began to assume a theoretic air, where poplars grew beside the pavement (when there was one) , and mingled their shade with the steep roofs of desultory Dutch houses, and where pigs and chickens disported themselves in the gutter. These elements of rural picturesqueness have now wholly departed from New York street scenery; but they were to be found within the memory of middle-aged persons, in quarters which now would blush to be reminded of them. ”

“ Ef there is anything about wheat and flour that they don’t know, you just want to go and tell ’em, you do, and they are the whitest men in the business. They have been longer in it than any two men livin'. They have the immense Eagle mill in Buffalo, and the Excelsior in Lockport, down on the second dock, the best water-power in Lockport, and that’s saying a good deal, for the fall there is immense—it is the water-power that has made Lockport. ”

“ It was a bright September afternoon, and the streets of New York were brilliant with moving men. They reminded John of the sea, as he sat in the square and watched them, so changelessly changing, so bright and dark, so grave and gay. He scanned their rich and faultless clothes, the way they carried their hands, the shape of their hats; he peered into the hurrying carriages. Then, leaning back with a sigh, he said, “This is the World.” The notion suddenly seized him to see where the world was going; since many of the richer and brighter seemed hurrying all one way. ”

“ "Is New York such a labyrinth? I thought it so straight up and down—like Fifth Avenue. And with all the cross streets numbered!" She seemed to guess his faint disapproval of this, and added, with the rare smile that enchanted her whole face: "If you knew how I like it for just THAT—the straight-up-and-downness, and the big honest labels on everything!"
He saw his chance. "Everything may be labelled—but everybody is not." ”

“ It's the whole country that makes or breaks a thing like this; New York has very little to do with it. Now if it were a play, it would be different. New York does make or break a play; but it doesn't make or break a book; it doesn't make or break a magazine. The great mass of the readers are outside of New York, and the rural districts are what we have got to go for. They don't read much in New York; they write, and talk about what they've written. Don't you worry." ”

“ Return, Robert Chalmers, to your handsome apartments. Draw down your folding-bed, turn on the heat, study those Chicago papers. Live once again! What is this? A reaction at Chicago. Why, here is a page of panegyric. Here is a large portrait of the late Hon. David Lockwin, lost in Georgian Bay!
The man whisks off his bed, and runs it up to the wall, whereupon he may confront a handsome mirror. He compares the two faces.
"A change. A change, indeed!" he exclaims sadly. It is not alone in the features. The new man is growing meager. He is an inconsequential person. ”

“ And even as this old guide-book boasts of the, to us, insignificant Liverpool of fifty years ago, the New York guidebooks are now vaunting of the magnitude of a town, whose future inhabitants, multitudinous as the pebbles on the beach, and girdled in with high walls and towers, flanking endless avenues of opulence and taste, will regard all our Broadways and Bowerys as but the paltry nucleus to their Nineveh. From far up the Hudson, beyond Harlem River, where the young saplings are now growing, that will overarch their lordly mansions with broad boughs, centuries old; ”

“ The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there’s nowhere else. It’s the top of the world. ”

“ Every boy and girl living on a farm in New York State twenty-five years or more ago, has in memory a picture like this: a stubbly hill-side field beset with russet shocks of corn and constellations of orange pumpkins, whence might be seen wide valleys filled with purple haze, and far hills bedecked with autumn tapestries woven about emerald patches of new wheat. ”

“ Mr. Locket conceded after a moment. “When should I find you at home?”
“Don’t come,” said the young man. “I make you no offer.”
“I might make you one,” the editor hinted. “Don’t trouble yourself; I shall probably destroy them.” With this Peter Baron took his departure, waiting however just afterwards, in the street near the house, as if he had been looking out for a stray hansom, to which he would not have signalled had it appeared. He thought Mr. Locket might hurry after him, but Mr. Locket seemed to have other things to do, and Peter Baron returned on foot to Jersey Villas. ”

“ It was thus, Archer reflected, that New York managed its transitions: conspiring to ignore them till they were well over, and then, in all good faith, imagining that they had taken place in a preceding age. ”

“ "I never been to New York, but it must be a heavenly place for a vacation, if a feller c'n judge by what some of my present boarders have to say about it. It's a sort of play-actor's paradise, ain't it?"
"It is paradise to every actor who happens to be on the road, Mr. Jones," said Barnes, slipping his big pack from his shoulders and letting it slide to the floor. ”

“ To create a larger public sentiment in favor of agriculture, to increase the farmer's respect for his own business,—these are the controlling purposes in the general movement that we are carrying forward under the title of nature-study. It is not by teaching agriculture directly that this movement can be started. The common schools in New York will not teach agriculture to any extent for the present, and the movement, if it is to arouse a public sentiment, must reach beyond the actual farmers themselves. The agricultural status is much more than an affair of mere farming. ”

“ Barney Bill and the freedom of the high-road and the light heart of the vagabond. You'll have a devilish sight more happiness in the end."
But Paul, who already looked upon his gipsy self as dead as his Bludston self, and these dead selves as stepping-stones to higher things, turned a deaf ear to his new friend's paradoxical philosophy. "I'll remember," said he. "Mr. W. W. Rowlatt, 4, Gray's Inn Square."
The young architect watched the van with its swinging, creaking excrescences lumber away down the hot and dusty road, and turned with a puzzled expression to his easel. ”