It was here that a young Bostonian, paying his first visit to the city in 1860,[246] found Whitman installed at the head of a long table, already a hero in that revolutionary young world. The _Press_ was his champion, and his voice was not to be silenced. Mr. Howells, for it was he, had been amused and amazed at the ferociously profane Bohemianism of the worthy editor, who had lived in Paris, and now worshipped it in the person of Victor Hugo as much as he detested Longfellow and Boston. Mr. Howells was astonished and deeply impressed by the extraordinary charm, gentleness and benignity of the man whom the _Press_ was extolling as arch-anarch and rebel. Whitman's eyes and voice made a frank and irresistible proffer of friendship, and he gave you his hand as though it were yours to keep. An atmosphere of unmistakable purity emanated from him in the midst of that thickness of smoke, that reek of beer and oysters and German cooking. He was clean as the sea is clean. He passed along the ordinary levels of life as one who lives among the mountains, and finds his home on Helicon or Olympus. Ada Clare[247] (Mrs. Julia Macelhinney), by all accounts a charming and brilliant woman, was queen of this rebel circle, and especially a friend of Whitman's. News of her tragic death from hydrophobia, caused by the bite of her pet dog, came as a terrible shock to all who had known her. He had other women friends, notably Mrs. "Abby" Price, of Brooklyn, and her two daughters.[248] The mother was an incurable lover of her kind, whose hospitality to the outcast survived all the frauds practised upon it. The haunted faces of the needy were becoming only too familiar both in New York and Brooklyn. The winter of 1857-58 had been a black one:[249] banks had broken, and work had come to a standstill; and there had been in consequence the direst need among the ever-increasing class of men who were wholly dependent upon their weekly earnings. The rise of this class in a new country marks the advent of the social problem in its more acute form: and from this date on there was a rapid development of the usual palliative agencies, missions, rescue-homes and what-not. The permanent problem of poverty had made its appearance in America. It need hardly be added that at the same time there were many evidences of the growing wealth of another class of the citizens, those whose profits were derived from land-values and the employment of wage-labour. The brown-stone characteristic of the modern city was now replacing the wood and brick which had hitherto lined Broadway,[250] as private houses gave way to shops and offices, hotels and theatres. Residences were built farther and farther up-town; and the Quarantine Station on Staten Island, which stood in the way of a similar expansion in that desirable quarter, was burnt out by aspiring citizens. And meanwhile the pressure of life in the East-side rookeries was growing more and more tyrannous.