Some spaces, probably held by the owners for that rise in value which the industry of others providentially gives to the land of the wise and good, it left vacant comparatively far down the road, and built up others at remoter points.

It was a world of lofty apartment houses beyond the Park, springing up in isolated blocks, with stretches of invaded rusticity between, and here and there an old country-seat standing dusty in its budding vines with the ground before it in rocky upheaval for city foundations.

But wherever it went or wherever it paused, New York gave its peculiar stamp; and the adventurers were amused to find One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street inchoately like Twenty-third Street and Fourteenth Street in its shops and shoppers.

The butchers' shops and milliners' shops on the avenue might as well have been at Tenth as at One Hundredth Street.
The adventurers were not often so adventurous.

They recognized that in their willingness to let their fancy range for them, and to let speculation do the work of inquiry, they were no longer young.