University of Virginia Library

1. Chapter I.
Footprints, and Where they led.

SNOW, falling in myriads of sharp particles, filling the
air with white, cold fleeces, and hiding house-roofs
and tree-tops, lintels of doors, awnings, and piles of building-materials,
and all the great city-squares, under an
icy covering.

Snow driving wildly around street corners, drifting
over crossings, penetrating narrow alleys and cellar-openings,
blown against walls, driven into nooks and crannies
of piers and wharves, and only melting away in the black
waters of the river.

Snow clinging to box-coats of stage drivers, accumulating
on coach-tops and wheels, and about the fetlocks
of horses, and upon harness, and beating against close
carriage windows.

Snow thrashed into the faces of pedestrians, congealing
in hair and beard, collecting on collars and in mufflefolds,
and whirling in gusts around human feet hurrying
homeward.

The winter's evening had set in with a violent storm
of snow descending incessantly. People gathered in areas

and under shelter of porches, watching for slow-moving
omnibuses to drag along, and dropping in, one by one, to
the last vacant seat. Men and women, bundled in shawls
and cloaks, their faces half hid in scarfs, plodded stubbornly
forward, with bowed forms, breasting the ice-laden
blasts. Lamp-lighters climbed iron posts, brightened their
features a moment with jets of gas, and then obscured
themselves in grey darkness beyond. Wheels ceased to
sound upon the pave, dulled by clogging snow. Broad
entrances to theatres, lit with many-colored lights, opened
for play-goers, but few play-goers passed in. Even the
green woollen doors of bar-rooms swung not often to
admit a visitor.

Anon the shutters of stores were flung up clatteringly
by shivering lads, locks were turned, and bolts made fast,
and clerks hastened to lone chambers, and crept quickly
to bed, hearing the sleet whirled fiercely against their window
panes. A little later, the theatre fronts were darkened,
and lights went out, one after another, behind the
screens of bar-rooms; and at length the glazed doors of
hotels were barred by grumbling porters, who then betook
themselves to doze in arm-chairs; and at last, the
wretched street-wantons, latest wanderers, crawled away
to their sad habitations.

Then, to eyes that looked between parted curtains from
some sick room, or to the night-watch, cowering under
porches and peering outward through blinding mist, the
streets grew white and desolate. Carriage ruts now became
level, under multitudinous flakes of snow, and prints
of human feet could no more be discerned upon the pavement.

Still the snow fell, drifted, and gathered silently,
overspreading the great city with white loneliness.

Very solemnly, muffled by thick atmosphere, the tongues
of church clocks told the hour of twelve, clanging to one
another, as if complaining of the stormy midnight. The
watchers, gazing from sick-rooms, listened a moment,
counting the strokes, and then turned away, smoothing
the curtain folds, and muttering “Who would be out
in a night like this?” And the night-guardians shrunk
back under shelter, haply murmuring, “God help the
poor!”

Then it was that, to eyes which scanned closely those
deserted walks wherever the dark snow clung so shroud-like,
there might have been visible a line of footprints,
going from the mouth of a dark alley, in a squalid quarter
of the city, traversing narrow streets, up to the great
Broadway thoroughfare, thence past the closed hotels and
theatres, and entering at length the iron-gated, lonesome
Park; not heavy boot-marks, tramping the pave with
wide strides, but small, uneven tracks, as of a child's
unsteady feet.

One, two, three—prints small as the span of my lady's
fingers—five, six, seven, sinking in the snow; thus on:
hundreds of little tracks through the silent streets, clouds
of drift constantly obliterating the tiny traces of a baby's
feet, toiling painfully through the storm of a December
midnight. O, if sleeping mothers, in that hour folding
the beloved in their arms, could dream of such infant
footprints in the snow, how closely would the little ones
be gathered to their trembling hearts! how tears would

steal from under drooped eyelashes, moistening the innocent
cheeks that nestled closely to maternal lips.

One, two, three: little tracks inside the iron gates,
around which sleet was whirling in sharp eddies; then
along the drifted walks across to Nassau street, through
snowy darkness, and down beside the walls of a lofty
building whence lights shone out of high windows, and
wherein crashed incessantly, like strokes of iron flails, the
laboring machinery of steam-presses, printing news of all
the world—bulletins of battles and elections, records of
markets and stocks—but seldom or never a word concerning
such trifles as I now write about—a child's footprints
in the snow.