thirteenth floor. Not the top floor--far from it. If you could slice off
the stories above the thirteenth, as you slice off the top of an egg,
and plant them down in Europe, they would of themselves make a biggish
hotel according to our standards. This first elevator voyage is the
prelude to how many others! For the past week I seem to have spent the
best part of my time in elevators. I must have travelled miles on miles
at right angles to the earth's surface. If all my ascensions could be
put together, they would out-top Olympus and make Ossa a wart.

This is the first sensation of life in New York--you feel that the
Americans have practically added a new dimension to space. They move
almost as much on the perpendicular as on the horizontal plane. When
they find themselves a little crowded, they simply tilt a street on end
and call it a sky scraper. This hotel, for example (the
Waldorf-Astoria), is nothing but a couple of populous streets soaring up
into the air instead of crawling along the ground. When I was here in
1877, I remember looking with wonder at the _Tribune_ building, hard by
the Post Office, which was then considered a marvel of architectural
daring. Now it is dwarfed into absolute insignificance by a dozen
Cyclopean structures on every hand. It looks as diminutive as the
Adelphi Terrace in contrast with the Hotel Cecil. I am credibly informed
that in some of the huge down-town buildings they run "express"
elevators, which do not stop before the fifteenth, eighteenth, twentieth
floor, as the case may be. Some such arrangement seems very necessary,
for the elevator _Bummelzugs_, which stop at every floor, take quite an
appreciable slice out of the average New York day. I wonder that
American ingenuity has not provided a system of pneumatic
passenger-tubes for lightning communication with these aërial suburbs,
these "mansions in the sky."