the East offered him continual entertainment in like sort. The sort was
never quite so squalid. For short distances the lowest poverty, the
hardest pressed labor, must walk; but March never entered a car without
encountering some interesting shape of shabby adversity, which was almost
always adversity of foreign birth. New York is still popularly supposed
to be in the control of the Irish, but March noticed in these East Side
travels of his what must strike every observer returning to the city
after a prolonged absence: the numerical subordination of the dominant
race. If they do not outvote them, the people of Germanic, of Slavonic,
of Pelasgic, of Mongolian stock outnumber the prepotent Celts; and March
seldom found his speculation centred upon one of these. The small eyes,
the high cheeks, the broad noses, the puff lips, the bare, cue-filleted
skulls, of Russians, Poles, Czechs, Chinese; the furtive glitter of
Italians; the blonde dulness of Germans; the cold quiet of Scandinavians
--fire under ice--were aspects that he identified, and that gave him
abundant suggestion for the personal histories he constructed, and for
the more public-spirited reveries in which he dealt with the future
economy of our heterogeneous commonwealth. It must be owned that he did
not take much trouble about this; what these poor people were thinking,
hoping, fearing, enjoying, suffering; just where and how they lived; who
and what they individually were--these were the matters of his waking
dreams as he stared hard at them, while the train raced farther into the
gay ugliness--the shapeless, graceful, reckless picturesqueness of the
Bowery.

There were certain signs, certain facades, certain audacities of the
prevailing hideousness that always amused him in that uproar to the eye
which the strident forms and colors made. He was interested in the
insolence with which the railway had drawn its erasing line across the
Corinthian front of an old theatre, almost grazing its fluted pillars,