He did, indeed, give out interviews to this effect, and gathered a considerable following. A little convention was called at Saratoga where, fired by fresh faith, Luke made his first political speech, holding up Leighton as the Erasmus of Republicanism. It was an unfortunate simile, for the opposition press lost no time in lampooning the District-Attorney as Erasmus at his weakest; but the movement grew, and Luke, in common with his fellow-believers, began to see light in the political darkness. He still possessed the beautiful power of dreaming, and when, by night, coming from a theater or leaving the house of Mrs. Ruysdael or one of her friends, he turned into Broadway and saw the myriad lights of its cafés mount heavenward and mix with and illuminate the pillars of smoke and steam rising from its chimneys, he could detect in their wreaths the faces of grinning devils raised by the pestilential life below, laughing at it, dipping enormous white claws to stir it, and then hissing skyward as if to proclaim, because of what New York was, their defiance of God. Once or twice, to escape from them, he walked as far downtown as Wall Street and loitered through the silent night, where the three churches stood on the modern battleground of mad finance to remind of its history the city with the shortest memory in Christendom. Mentally, he converted that portion of the town to what it once had been. He saw it the home of a modest aristocracy in simple houses along shaded streets, a center of good taste, of culture, of social well-being. The old Astor House, now fallen into shabby desuetude, he pictured as it was when state banquets were given there, and when it was the one place in which the distinguished visitor would stop. Close by the spot where the Woolworth Building to-day houses eighteen thousand persons, the Astor House had moved Horace Greeley to admiration because six hundred and forty-seven persons slept under its roof. There Clay had received the news of his nomination in 1844, and Webster the word of his defeat at the hands of the Whig convention in 1852. That hotel had been familiar to Pierce, Van Buren, Buchanan, and Taylor, to Seward, Choate, and Douglas. Edward, Prince of Wales, had given it an almost royal atmosphere, and recollections of Lincoln still hung about its tarnished walls.