Here is one wall which survives from the prehistoric days of thirty years ago; it is the rear wall of the old hospital, that blessed green spot in the midst of the city, which is to be green no more, but will soon be piled with more palaces. And opposite this wall is a short street running from Church to West Broadway. A few years ago this was one of the worst of city slums. At the corner of West Broadway a wooden building still remains--a sullen, sickly, defiant cur of a building--that sits and snarls impotent over the savagery departed. And there is one tall rookery still, a tenement-house, with a system of fire-escapes in front, and the slattern slopping at the curb as in the ancient day, and a cooper's shop, and a blacksmith's, and one, two, three, how many whiskey shops? But they are all faint and feeble and submerged in the lofty buildings, and to-morrow all trace of them will be gone. And then who will remember the murder? The mysterious, awful, romantic murder. The murder that filled all the newspapers, and fed speculation at all the corner groggeries and in all offices. The murder that was done into a romance, and of which the hero--that is the murderer--was acquitted, after one of the famous eloquent criminal appeals which are so effective because their power is measured by human life. And this hero occasionally reappears in the newspapers even to this day. Somebody writes from a remote somewhere that on a steamer far away a mysterious man, after much mysterious conduct, imparts the awful truth that he is the hero. Does he sometimes return to this spot? Does he look at the site of the house where the deed was done? Does he appear in the guise of a merchant, a jobber, a retailer from that remote southwestern somewhere, and higgle and chaffer in the noble warehouse on the very site of the wretched building where he murdered his mistress? Good heavens! Do you see that man of about those years, looking about as if to find a sign or number? (As if he didn't know the very place; as if it were not burned and cut into his heart and conscience!) Do you think it could possibly be he, or is it, after all, only the honest Timothy Tape, the modest retailer from Skowhegan or Palmyra?... The typhus-fever used to rage here; the cholera was fearful. The sanitary reports say that there were always cases of the worst diseases to be found here. The city missionaries also used to find their worst cases here too, and now, what cleanliness of collar, what modishness of coat! No more sin; what a consolation!