An excerpt from: CHAPTER I. MATTERS APPERTAINING TO THE WORLD OF FASHION.
About forty years ago there stood in one of the up-town streets crossing the avenues, and but a few doors from one of them, a two-story brick house, which, in a less pretentious neighborhood, would have passed for a tolerably decent dwelling, which rank it once indubitably held. Unluckily for the peace and contentment of its occupants, two brown-stone houses, one of three, and the other of no less than four stories, had provokingly reared themselves on either side, throwing our humble two-story brick altogether into the shade. Had they been plain houses the matter had not been quite so bad, but their respective owners were not men to put up plain houses; one of them was a butcher, and the other a baker in the vicinity, who having catered for the creature-comforts of the public to some purpose, found themselves in possession of bank-books representing a good round sum in hard specie. The money was vested in two of the oldest and safest banks in the city, the butchers book aforesaid bearing on its cover the responsible name of the Chemical, whilst the bakers displayed the equally well-accredited name of the Mechanics Bank. This was very well and very safe, and all that, but all at once he of the Chemical took it into his head that a bankbook wasnt much to look at, after all, and so he began to open his ear to the persuasive accents of his wife and daughters who had been long urging him to build a house for them. He had held out manfully for a year or two after the last of his six daughters came home from boarding-school freighted with the usual load of accomplishments, but at last the seven feminines came down on him with the parallel case (fished from the items of a daily paper) of some old fogy somewhere or another that had a whole mint of money framed up in his parlor in a bank-bill. The butcher had never read of the amiable patriarch of English literati, * who, in our own day, so far broke the charm that makes poverty and literary pursuits all but synonymous, but there was no getting over the triumphant argument adduced by the Seven Champions: What earthly use was that bill to that old fellow, and wasnt it just the same with hit little book. Wouldnt it be better for him to have the money in the walls of a nice house that would be a credit to himself and his family after him? The butcher gave in, the Chemical had its deposits lessened by twenty thousand dollars, but the house went up in a style of splendor befitting the ambitious pretensions of the family to whose credit it was to redound in perpetuo. The progress of this new neighbor, destined to rejoice in the round number of 66-was watched with awful interest by the inmates of the two-story brick, 68 by number, and as pediment, and architrave, and balcony arose, tier after tier, decked with all the elaboration of the stone-cutters craft, the female occupants of 68, three in number, keeping watch in their turn from behind their carefully-closed jalousies, noted with doleful discontent the growing splendors of the mansion. It was really too bad, the young ladies said-they were three motherless sisters- too bad that no spot in the city would serve those up-setting Gallaghers to put up their castle on but that vacant lot next to them....