“The poor women?—oh, they remained poor—nothing in _your_ day ever happened to better their condition when a calamity like that overtook _them_. Men had enough to do to pity and help themselves. Yes, their loss was in the insolvency of the insurance companies; but stock is safe enough now, for the last tremendous fire (they did not let the first make the impression it ought to have done,) roused the energies and _sense_ of the people, and insurance is managed very different. Every house, now, whether of the rich or the poor man, is insured. It has to pay so much additional tax, and the corporation are the insurers. But the tax is so trifling that no one feels it a burden; our houses are almost all fire-proof since the discovery of a substance which renders wood almost proof against fire. But I have a file of the Recorder of Self-Inflicted Miseries, and you will see the regular gradation from the barbarisms of your day to the enlightened times it has been permitted you to see.” “But the water, in my day,”—poor Hastings never repeated this without a sigh—“in my day the city was supplied by water from a brackish stream, but there was a plan in contemplation to bring good water to the city from the distance of forty miles.” “Where, when was that? I do not remember to have read any thing about it.—Oh, yes, there was such a scheme, and it appears to me they did attempt it, but whatever was the cause of failure I now forget; at present they have a plentiful supply by means of boring. Some of these bored wells are upwards of a thousand feet deep.” “Why the Manhattan Company made an attempt of this kind in my time, but they gave it up as hopeless after going down to the depth of six or seven hundred feet.”