The night was as brilliant as the day. All the places of public amusement were crowded and at the Tabernacle a sacred concert was given. The fair at Niblo’s was suffocatingly frequented, and the fireworks were splendid. At Castle Garden there were fireworks and a balloon ascension. The museums and hotels were brilliantly illuminated; and at the Astor House seven hundred window lights were hung. The Common Council caused a silver medal to be struck in commemoration of the occasion, showing on one side the reservoir on Murray’s Hill, on the other a cross-section of the aqueduct. It would savor of boasting, perhaps, to aver that this medal was the ugliest in the history of medalurgy. Better than all the fireworks of oratory or powder, more blithe than all the brass music, the roar of cannon and the rattle of firearms, the bunting and the glitter, was the sudden outburst of the fountains. The water that had come running down from the Croton dam leaped into the air and fell with a resounding uproar. It reveled in the light and bloomed in gigantic blossoms whose frothy shapes hardly changed, though the drops that made them were never for a moment the same, but always a new throng that rushed up and lapsed with a constant splashing and bubbling. In the City Hall Park the Croton flung itself sixty feet in the air and came back diamonds. Eighteen jets were so arranged that they designed various figures, “The Maid of the Mist,” “The Croton Plume,” “The Dome.” In Union Park there was a willow that wept gleaming stars. In Harlem there was a geyser more than a hundred feet tall. And the sunlight thrust rainbows in among the silvery columns. At night colored fireworks made them uncanny with glamor. The people felt that the curses of thirst and plague and fire were indeed banished forever. Time would blight this hope as it upsets all other reckonings upon perfection, but for the moment hope announced the millennium and everybody believed her. By midnight the town was as weary as a boys’ school after a holiday. When Patty and her husband reached home they found Keith awake and waiting for them. Immy was asleep, her head enarmed like a bird’s head curled under its wing. But Keith was staring from his cot. His little eight-year-old head was athrob with gigantic plans that made doorknobs of his eyes. “Papa, I been thinkin’. You know when I was little I was going to be the man who lights the street lamps; an’ ’en I was goin’ to be a night watchman when I got grown up; an’ ’en I was goin’ to be a lawyer like you are, and help you. But now I guess I’ll be a nengineer an’ build waterworks an’ aqueducks an’ things like that—like Uncle Harry did the Croton. And some day they’ll have a percession for me, too. You just wait and see.”