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now seemed as far away as Louisiana and the Pacific.

 
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NEW YORK

8
    T HE L ORD B ALTIMORE
arrived in Manhatten early on the second morning of our voyage, with me much the worse for wear. My uncle, however, who had never been sick a day in his life, had sat up all night and all day and all night again, yarning with the captain and crew, lending a hand with a rope or a navigational measurement and even taking a turn at the wheel, where he demonstrated a very nice touch. He was so popular that the captain urged us to continue on to Baltimore with them the following morning. True allowed that we might avail ourselves of his offer, but first we would try once more to raise a stake for our expedition. Just how we would do this he did not say, and I could only hope that he did not have in mind another lecture. Also, he confided to me just before we docked that in New York he hoped to locate the “Gentleman from Vermont”—“whose hash he would settle once and for all” by stuffing him into his carpetbag and heaving him into the ocean.
    Once ashore, we had a breakfast of bacon and eggs, which was just the right tonic for me, at a little inn called the Sign of the Tipsy Argonaut, where we also secured a room for that night. Then we struck off up lower Broadway. It was a fine sunny morning, with a scattering of high white clouds and a touch of spring in the air. The street teemed with horses pulling beer wagons, lumber wagons, fruit wagons, vegetable wagons. On the corners evangelists preached, fishwives shrieked their briny wares, sailors lurched, boys hawked newspapers and blacked boots. My uncle was in his element, gleefully prying under flounders and cabbage leaves at an out-of-doors market and even popping into shops and offices and shouting “I spy!”—in an attempt to “flush out” or “start” the Gentleman. “Aye,” he said, “I’m sure he’s nearby, Ti, for I smell sulphur.” As indeed he did, there being a little paper mill just across the street, where the newsprint for the
Times of New York
was manufactured. Which quite persuaded my uncle that somehow his friend was connected with the
Times
itself.
    A lady approached my uncle, tweaked at his chain mail, and tickled his scarlet codpiece. “Anyone home?” she said.
    â€œNay, nay, madam,” he cried, leaping back. “We shall have none of that.”
    At this he pulled me off down the crowded street—though not before he had pressed a shilling into the woman’s hand. And though he continued to look for the sooty old lad he had expelled from Vermont, peering into every alleyway to see if he might catch a glimpse of him, he said that New York was “a
real metropolis,
not”—casting a scornful glance northward, in the direction of Boston—“a warren of tight-fisted, literal-minded, pedantical naysayers who wouldn’t know a great adventure if it were to bite them in the hinderquarters.”
    In the meantime, the private was giving away our few remaining shillings to the beggars, orphans, and crippled people in the street at an alarming rate. Tears started to his eyes at the sight of these unfortunates, who were now flocking after us as if we were leading a ragamuffin crusade. One of their rank, a little chimney sweep of about ten, thrust into my uncle’s hand a circular advertising the Circus of Grotesqueries, at the Orpheus Theater on Broadway and 35th Street.
    There, for a penny apiece, we were treated to a peep-show featuring a giant named Joseph Hall from Auburn, New York, a sword-swallower, a fire-eater, and a genuine Seneca Indian princess. For another penny each we were permitted to interview the celebrated Mrs. Peg O’Shaye of Dublin, Ireland, who had enjoyed earlier existences as Mary Magdalene, Joan of Arc, and William Penn. I loved seeing these walking wonders, whom my uncle straightaway recruited for the cast of