They passed up Broadway and turned across to the Bowery. Crossing the broad pavement of the busy thoroughfare, they went into a narrow street beyond, and so toward the East River. At length they stopped before a low, modest house near a quiet corner. A sloppy kitchen-maid stood upon the area steps abreast of the street. A few miserable trees, pining to death in the stone desert of the town, were boxed up along the edge of the sidewalk. A scavenger's cart was joggling along, and a little behind, a ragman's wagon with a string of jangling bells. The smell of the sewer was the chief odor, and the long lines of low, red brick houses, with wooden steps and balustrades, and the blinds closed, completed a permanent camp of dreariness. "Does Fanny Newt live there?" asked Gabriel, in a tone which indicated that there might be hearts in which honey was not abundantly hived. "Yes," said May, gravely. "You know they have very little to live upon, and--and--oh dear, I don't like to speak of it, Gabriel, but they are very miserable." Gabriel said nothing, but rang the bell. The sloppy servant having stared wildly for a moment at the apparition of blooming love that had so incomprehensibly alighted upon the steps, ducked under them, and in a moment reappeared at the door. She seemed to recognize May, and said "Yes'm" before any question had been asked. Gabriel and May walked into the little parlor. It was dark and formal. There was a black haircloth sofa with wooden edges all over it, so that nobody could lean or lounge, or do any thing but sit uncomfortably upright. There were black haircloth chairs, a table with two or three books; two lamps with glass drops upon the mantle; a thin cheap carpet; gloom, silence, and a complicated smell of grease--as if the ghosts of all the wretched dinners that had ever been cooked in the house haunted it spitefully. While May went up stairs to find Fanny, Gabriel Bennet looked and smelled around him. He had not believed that a human home could be so dismal, and he could not understand how haircloth furniture and dimness could make it so. His father's house was certainly not very large; and it was scantily and plainly furnished, but no Arabian palace had ever seemed so splendid to his imagination as that home was dear to his heart. No, it isn't the furniture nor the smell, thought he. I am quite sure it is something that I neither see nor smell that makes the difference.