In front of the Stock Exchange, and for two or three blocks below, Broad Street was absolutely bare, except for a little knot of men working over a man-hole of the electrical conduit. The ten-story buildings lifted themselves aloft on both sides of the street, without any evidence of life from window or doorway; they were as silent and seemingly empty as though they belonged to a deserted city of the plains. Bar-rooms in cellars had bock-beer placards before their closed portals. On the glass panel of the swing-door which admitted the week-day passer-by to the Business Men's Quick Lunch there was wafered the bill of fare of the day before, but the door itself was closed tight. So were the entrances to more pretentious restaurants. But as Filson Shelby and Edna Leisler went on farther down-town, Broad Street slowly changed its character. There were not so many office buildings and more retail shops; there were a few wholesale warehouses; there were even cheap flat-houses; and there were more signs of life. Children began to fill the roadway and the sidewalks. There were boys on tri-cycles, and there were Little Mothers pushing perambulators in which babies lay asleep. There were girls on roller-skates; and one of these, a tall, lanky child, had a frolicsome black poodle, which pulled her quickly along the sidewalk. Seeing some of these things, and not seeing others, and being taken up wholly by their own talk, the young Southwesterner and the New York girl passed through Whitehall Street and came out on the Battery. They walked to the edge of the water, and looked across the waves to the Statue of Liberty holding her torch aloft. An Italian steamer full of immigrants was just coming up from Quarantine. The afternoon was clear, after the rain of the night before, and yet there was a haze on the horizon. The huge grain-elevators over on the Jersey shore stood out against the sky defiantly. A fringe of men and women sat on the seats around the grass-plots and along the sea-wall. Many of the women had children in their arms or at their skirts. Most of the men were reading the gaudily illustrated Sunday newspapers; some of them were smoking. The sea-breeze blew mildly, with a foretaste of warm weather. The grass-plots were brownish-gray, with but the barest touch of green at the edges, and there was never a bud yet on any of the skeleton trees. None the less did every one know that the winter was gone for good, and that any day almost the spring might come in with a rush.