HIMSELF FOR COMPANY.

For years Philip Hayn had been wondering about the great city only a hundred or two miles distant from his home,—wondering, reading, and questioning,—until he knew far more about it than thousands of men born and reared on Manhattan Island. He had dreamed of the day when he would visit the city, and had formed plans and itineraries for consuming such time as he hoped to have, changing them again and again to conform to longer or shorter periods. He was prepared to be an intelligent tourist, to see only what was well worth being looked at, and to study much that could not be seen in any other place which he was ever likely to visit.

At last he was in New York: his time would be limited only by the expense of remaining at hotel or boarding-house. Yet he found himself utterly without impulse to follow any of his carefully-perfected plans. He strolled about a great deal, but in an utterly aimless way. He passed public buildings which he knew by sight as among those he had intended to inspect, but he did not even enter their doors; the great libraries in which for years he had hoped to quench the literary thirst that had been little more than tantalized by the collective books in{75} Haynton were regarded with impatience. Of all he saw while rambling about alone, nothing really fixed his attention but the contents of shop-windows. He could not pass a clothing-store without wondering if some of the goods he saw within would not become him better than what he was wearing; he spent hours in looking at displays of dress-goods and imagining how one or other pattern or fabric would look on Lucia; and he wasted many hours more in day-dreams of purchasing—only for her—the bits of jewelry and other ornaments with which some windows were filled.

Loneliness increased the weakening effect of his imaginings. He knew absolutely no one in the city but the Tramlays and Marge, and he had too much sense to impose himself upon them; besides, Marge was terribly uninteresting to him, except as material for a study of human nature,—material that was peculiarly unattractive when such a specimen as Lucia was always in his mind’s eye and insisting upon occupying his whole attention.

His loneliness soon became intolerable; after a single day of it he hurried to the river, regardless of probable criticism and teasing based on his new clothes, to chat with Sol Mantring and the crew of the sloop. The interview was not entirely satisfactory, and Phil cut his visit short, departing with a brow full of wrinkles and a heart full of wonder and indignation at the persistency with which Sol and both his men talked of Lucia Tramlay and the regard in which they assumed Phil held her. How should they imagine such a thing? He well knew—and{76} detested—the rural rage for prying into the affairs of people, particularly young men and women who seemed at all fond of one another; but what had he ever done or said to make these rough fellows think Lucia was to him anything but a boarder in his father’s house? As he wondered, there came to his mind a line which he had often painfully followed in his copy-book at school: “The face of youth is an open book.” It did not tend at all to restore composure to his own face.

Hour by hour he found himself worse company. He had never before made such a discovery. There had been hundreds and thousands of days in his life when from dawn to dark he had been alone on the farm, in the woods, or in his fishing-boat, several miles off shore on the ocean; yet the companionship of his thoughts had been satisfactory. He had sung and whistled by the hour, recited to himself favorite bits of poetry and prose, rehearsed old stories and jokes, and enjoyed himself so well that sometimes he was annoyed rather than pleased when an acquaintance would appear and insist on diverting his attention to some trivial personal or business affair. Why could he not cheer himself now?—he who always had been the life and cheer of whatever society he found himself in?

He tried to change the current of his thoughts by looking at other people; but the result was dismal in the extreme. He lounged about Broadway, strolled in Central Park, walked down Fi............