Anthony called up a picture of his beautiful young mother, with her shining hair and Spanish eyes. She had not fitted very well into the life of the sober, mercantile town when she came there; her heart was lonely; she longed for a warmer sky and a less contained people. But, and she told Anthony this more than once when he was a growing boy, she had read what was in the old man's mind. She would, so he thought, take his son away; she would take a prop from under the bulky business before it got the strength of full maturity; and by so doing she would destroy much that he had labored to build. "I was proud," she told her son, and Anthony recalled how her eyes shone as she said it. "He despised my people. He thought them weak; he believed they could not bear up under suffering." If this were so, she proved him wrong, for she stayed on uncomplainingly until the old man's death; then her resolution would carry her no further; her health began to break, and Anthony's father, who was devoted to her, took her back to the low, soft country she loved. A dray, rattling over the stones and under one of the arches, roused Anthony from his thoughts. He looked about. The counting-house would, of course, face upon Water Street, and so he made his way around and presented himself therein. It was a fine, airy place with wide spaces and an air of opulent leisure. A man with an affable manner, and his graying hair done in an old-fashioned queue, glanced at him inquiringly. "I should like," said Anthony, "to speak with Mr. Charles Stevens." "I'm sorry," said the affable man, "but he is not in the city at present. Could you step in at another time; or would you care to entrust me with a message?" "I will return," said Anthony, and went out. Here were the Newcastle sloops, with their passengers going aboard for the trip down the river. A trim schooner with a fleet-looking hull, flying the flag of the New York Packet Line, was warping into a dock near the Crooked Billet Tavern; and Anthony paused, among a group of idlers, to watch the operation. A score or more of passengers with their baggage stood upon the deck ready to come ashore. "More of them," grumbled a stocky man at Anthony's elbow. He carried a basket of ship carpenter's tools on his shoulder, and his face wore a look of indignation. "You see them everywhere you go. The people they plundered for so many centuries won't let them stay in their own country, and they come down on us like locusts." A man in a butcher's apron nodded. "Not like locusts--more like hawks," said he. "Look at that old one there; if he's not like a grandfather kite with his eyes going around for something to fasten his talons in, I never saw one."