As RoBards limped along on strangely flagging feet, he thought he caught a glimpse of his boy Junior and the Lasher girl at his side, standing arm in arm at the curb. But in the twinkling of an eye-lid they were gone. Keith had marched, of course, with the Seventh, but the Sixty-ninth, made up of Irishmen, had refused to pay honor to the Sassenach prince. Its colors were taken away and it drilled no more. When riot or parade or drill was not afoot, the aqueduct was forever haling Keith forth. For the restless town kept hewing down the hills that covered its upper regions, or cutting streets through and leaving houses perched in air. In 1840 the Water Commissioners had decided that the city would not reach Ninety-fourth Street “for a century or two”; but it was crawling thither fast. Like sculptors who, as they carve off the clay, uncover the iron armature, the engineers were constantly disclosing anew their own deep-buried water mains and they must needs sink them still deeper. Often the pipes broke in their subterrene beds. This was like the rupture of an artery inside a man, and it required quick surgery to avert a fatal hemorrhage. On a December midnight in 1860 two mains were rent open twenty feet below the ground at Sixty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue. The upwelling flood turned the avenue into a swamp and endangered the foundations of certain new buildings. Fortunately, they were few and unimportant so far out of town, mainly crude shacks. But all the factories in town had to be ordered to cease the use of water, and the anxious city learned that the Croton was a vital aorta. The vast accumulation in the reservoir at Forty-Second Street was sucked down to within a foot of the bottom. Chief Engineer Craven had his men at work within thirty minutes of the disaster, and for fifty hours they dabbled in the muck, battling the leaping waters while new pipes were crowded in. Keith was among the fiercest toilers. He fought with the ardor of a Hollander at a broken dyke, and would not give over till he fell prone and had like to have drowned in the mud. Shortly after this there was a strange break in the subterranean financial waters: a mysterious panic shook the commercial peace of New York. The reservoirs of credit dried up over night. Bankers, the least unreliable of prophets, were smitten with a great terror, which their clients promptly shared. Its meaning was public all too soon. On December twenty-first there was another break in the water mains at Sixty-fourth Street, where the pipes had been carried across a marsh in a raised embankment. As Keith worked with his men that morning his heart was shaken for the morning papers had shrieked the telegraphic news that, on the day before, the state of South Carolina had seceded from the Union, had actually carried out what nearly everybody had pooh-poohed as a silly threat. The South Carolina newspapers spoke of New York and other states as foreign countries.