vast, dingy arm round my shoulders, and bellowed, "We'll have your
baggage right along to your hotel in two hours." It was a lie, but
kindly. That grimy and generous embrace left me startled, but an
initiate into Democracy.

The other evening I went a lonely ramble, to try to detect the essence
of New York. A wary eavesdropper can always surprise the secret of a
city, through chance scraps of conversation, or by spying from a window,
or by coming suddenly round corners. I started on a 'car.' American
tram-cars are open all along the side and can be entered at any point in
it. The side is divided by vertical bars. It looks like a cage with the
horizontal lines taken out. Between these vertical bars you squeeze into
the seat. If the seat opposite you is full, you swing yourself along the
bars by your hands till you find room. The Americans become terrifyingly
expert at this. I have seen them, fat, middle-aged business men,
scampering up and down the face of the cars by means of their hands,
swinging themselves over and round and above each other, like nothing in
the world so much as the monkeys at the Zoo. It is a people informed
with vital energy. I believe that this exercise, and the habit of
drinking a lot of water between meals, are the chief causes of their
good health.

The Broadway car runs mostly along the backbone of the queer island on
which this city stands. So the innumerable parallel streets that cross
it curve down and away; and at this time street after street to the west
reveals, and seems to drop into, a mysterious evening sky, full of dull
reds and yellows, amber and pale green, and a few pink flecks, and in
the midst, sometimes, the flushed, smoke-veiled face of the sun. Then
greyness, broken by these patches of misty colour, settles into the
lower channels of the New York streets; while the upper heights of the