left me shortly. No, I couldn't be a poet like our Morning-Street friend.
But see! the human wave is beginning to sprinkle the pavement with cooks
and second-girls."

They were frowzy serving-maids and silent; each swept down her own door
steps and the pavement in front of her own house, and then knocked her
broom on the curbstone and vanished into the house, on which the hand of
change had already fallen. It was no longer a street solely devoted to
the domestic gods, but had been invaded at more than one point by the
bustling deities of business in such streets the irregular, inspired
doctors and doctresses come first with inordinate door-plates, then a
milliner filling the parlor window with new bonnets; here even a
publisher had hung his sign beside a door, through which the feet of
young ladies used to trip, and the feet of little children to patter.
Here and there stood groups of dwellings unmolested as yet outwardly; but
even these had a certain careworn and guilty air, as if they knew
themselves to be cheapish boarding-houses or furnished lodgings for
gentlemen, and were trying to hide it. To these belonged the frowzy
serving-women; to these the rows of ash-barrels, in which the decrepit
children and mothers of the streets were clawing for bits of coal.

By the time Basil and Isabel reached Broadway there were already some
omnibuses beginning their long day's travel up and down the handsome,
tiresome length of that avenue; but for the most part it was empty. There
was, of course, a hurry of foot-passengers upon the sidewalks, but these
were sparse and uncharacteristic, for New York proper was still fast
asleep. The waiter at the restaurant into which our friends stepped was
so well aware of this, and so perfectly assured they were not of the
city, that he could not forbear a little patronage of them, which they
did not resent. He brought Basil what he had ordered in barbaric