Midnight Oil And Beach Combing

( Originally Published 1912 )

THE Tribune had not yet moved into its present commodious quarters, nor given occasion for Mr. Dana's salute to Mr. Reid as the "young man in the tall tower." It was housed in a drab, pre-carious shell on the same site. The rooms of the editorial department were small, dirty, and dilapidated, but what a staff it was that crowded them ! — John Hay, George Ripley, Isaac H. Bromley, Bayard Taylor, William Win-ter, E. L. Burlingame, and Clarence Cook, besides Mr. Greeley and Mr. Reid. There were not desks or chairs enough, and sometimes we had to wait in turn for them, standing until they became vacant. Clarence Cook was the art critic and a severe one. "Are you through with that desk, Cook ?" Bromley asked him, and, on receiving assent, added, "Then scrape away all the blood and feathers and let me sit down."

Hay delighted everybody in the office by his wit and kindness. One evening he cried out to Bromley and Bishop : "All done, fellows ! "

"What have you been writing about?" Bishop asked. "I've been going for them kings again, and if they only knew it, they'd be shaking in their boots."

On another occasion long afterward, when the anti-imperialists were urging that the United States should not retain the Philippines but give them away, or sell them to Germany or Japan, Hay said :

"That reminds me of the young woman who had got religion and was telling her experience in a conference meeting. Wishing to adduce proof of the thoroughness of her conversion, she said: 'When I found that my jewellery was dragging me down to hell, I gave it all to my sister.'"

He wore no beard in those days, only a raven and somewhat desperate-looking moustache, and he always dressed in black, whether for mourning or not, I do not know. Out of doors he sported a silk hat in all kinds of weather. I remember his attire because it was similar to that which the artist provided for John Oakhurst in one of the illustrations to Bret Harte's "Outcasts of Poker Flat."

He was very kind in many ways to the younger men. Occasionally the voice of a novice in the office would be heard above the sound of moving pens and pencils, pleading for information : "Who was Dahlberg?" "What did Van Heemskirk do?" "Where's Kastamoonee?" A murmur of protest instead of reply would follow: "Shut up!" "Go back to school!" "Throw some-thing at him!" Each had his own difficulties and pro-tested against the interruption, except Hay. While the questioner searched the ceiling in despair relief would come from Hay as from a talking encyclopaedia, without a moment's delay in the task that absorbed him.

Mine was night work; that is to say, it began earlier than five o'clock every afternoon, and never ended before half-past two in the morning, when, in the fetid air of the low-roofed, narrow, insanitary room, packed with re-porters and assistant editors, and foggy with tobacco, I could at last stretch in my chair and chat for a few minutes with my vis-ΰ-vis, the amiable and optimistic Isaac Nelson Ford, who after more than forty years still serves the same paper in the important and enviable position of its London correspondent, as successor to Mr. George W. Smalley. I call Ford the oldest of my friends, but except in years he is the youngest.

We read the city "copy," polished it, condensed it, and gave it headings, ever watchful in all our haste that nothing libellous or contrary to the traditions and usages of the paper should pass. The matter reached us sheet by sheet, as it was dashed off by the men in the throes of the closing hour, and after revision, which eliminated errors of fact and taste, it as rapidly flew from us into the creaking little box which shot up and down between us and the composing room, on the next floor. There were no pneumatic tubes, telephones, or electric bells in that office. Up and down continually went the box, slung in its chute by a frayed cord, until the last line of the last sheet of quires and reams ended the strain in the two words, "Good Night."

Those were extraordinarily busy and exciting times, and every man on the staff gave himself unsparingly to them. The exposure and defeat of the Tweed Ring had hardly been accomplished before Mr. Greeley received the Liberal Republican nomination for the presidency, and throughout that campaign the Tribune office became the rallying place of the politicians who supported him, including diamond-fronted leaders and short-haired, brown-mouthed "heelers" of the slum wards. They were at our elbows and over our shoulders early and late, sober or drunk, clean in person sometimes and frequently not, decent in speech and occasionally indecent, ready to talk to the "devil" if they could not reach Mr. Greeley himself, or some one near him. The foul air became fouler and more difficult to breathe; the fumes of alcohol and monstrous cigars took away the flavour of the mild tobacco we smoked in our inoffensive pipes, such as "Bull Durham" and "Fruits and Flowers." The barbarians were upon us and civilization seemed "played out."

Mr. Greeley was a pathetic figure through it all, wearied, excitable, and short-tempered. His face was as clear and as ingenuous as a child's. An actor making up for the part of an idealized farmer in a play could not have proved fidelity to nature better than by reproducing his open and fresh countenance with its careless fringes and wisps of hair, and his loose, easy-fitting clothes, neat and clean, but with no more shape and no finer texture than the Abigail of any old homestead could give them. The soft hat on his head might have been dropped there by a wind from heaven. Indifference to appearances and no thought but of comfort were pro-claimed almost too loudly, and his habit of having one trousers-leg turned up while the other was turned down left even in my innocent and unsophisticated mind an unwilling suspicion of intention.

He seemed too like "the real thing" to be it. Amiable and odorous of pastures and barns and hayricks as he looked in repose, he was irascible, and perhaps not less like the real farmer because he swore. One of the reporters had been sent out to investigate a charge of adulteration brought against a firm of confectioners, and confirmed it. When his report appeared, Mr. Greeley was furious, for the confectioners were old friends of his. Excuses that should have been unnecessary did not appease him.

"G — d d — n him ! discharge him!" he cried shrilly, though curiously enough his face preserved its apostolic benignity, even while the oaths were flying from his lips. I am glad to add that he probably never thought of the matter again, and that the blameless young man was not discharged.

His squalls usually blew themselves out without uprooting anything. One morning he came down to the office in a rage because there was a misprint in one of his editorials. Bounding upstairs into the composing room, and shaking a copy of the paper folded across the page to show the offence, he shrieked : "Show me the man ! Show me the man that did this ! "

A very old compositor was pointed out to him. Mr. Greeley looked at the culprit, who shrank under his gaze. All his indignation subsided, not another word was spoken. He turned and crept downstairs as if he and not the old compositor had been the offender.

He wrote in another editorial of "champagne and Heidsieck," referring to the lavish living of the Erie conspirators, and when the tautology of the phrase was explained to him he said : "Well, I guess I am the only man in this office that could make a mistake of that sort."

His outbreaks of temper often rent the air toward the end of his campaign, and when the debacle ensued, loyal and energetic as we had been in his cause, our sighs had their source in relief as much as in sorrow. The morning after the elections an editorial was printed under the head of "Crumbs of Comfort." The crumbs of comfort were that, though Mr. Greeley had lost, consolation could be derived from the thought that the office would be free in the future from the invasion of the dirty barbarians of his camp. It echoed, I think, the private opinions of all of us.

Restored to its former condition, overcrowded as that was, the office became quiet and spacious in comparison with what it had been during the campaign. While the editorial was a fine example of the mordant satire poignantly phrased which more than one of the staff excelled in, no one could regard it as politic or gracious, which, of course, its author never meant it to be. Mr. Greeley wanted a retraction or an apology, but it never appeared, and gossip whispered that that made the last insupportable straw in the burden of the chagrined and failing old man, who soon afterward re-tired to his farm at Chappaqua.

Are there coffee and cake saloons in the basements of Park Row and the tail end of Chatham Street now? Is Oliver Hitchcock's gone? In the early seventies there were plenty of them. They existed for owls: for the conductors and drivers of the old, jingling, creeping Third and Fourth Avenue horse-cars; for newsboys and bootblacks; for the unwashed and unhoused waifs of the night; for printers, reporters, and editors. All they offered was coffee in earthenware cups as heavy as bombshells, and hot soda biscuits upon which you deposited pats of very yellow butter similar to that slighted by Perkins Middlewick in "Our Boys" as "common Do'set. " The tables were uncovered, the floors bare, or sanded, or sprinkled with sawdust. The gas waxed and waned, an emblem of despair and irresolution.

But what merry times we had there when we descended into that atmosphere of old leather and old clothes at about midnight for half an hour of rest and simple fare! Distinctions of rank were sunk in those intermissions, and sometimes the young fellows had the glory of sitting with their elders and superiors with John Hay, Bromley, Noah Brooks, and Charles T. Congden, that queer and brilliant man, whose editorials were so good that they received the unusual honour of republication in a book. I have seen Mark Twain and Bret Harte there also, and now and then our laughter would be so loud that the dingy, taciturn company at the other tables would look at us suspiciously, wondering how we could be so gay in a world that was so dark and joyless to them.

Years afterward, when Mr. Hay preceded Mr. Reid in the ambassadorial honours of London and received his friends at his stately residence in Carlton House Terrace, you had but to whisper in his ear, "Oliver Hitchcock," and however serious he might be his face would at once soften into a knowing smile, as though you had spoken a password of fellowship in the guarded privileges and pleasures of some secret society.

Our work done, Ford and I flew together for the three o'clock boat of the Fulton Ferry to Brooklyn, swallowing an oyster on the way at one of the booths in the old market. The river was unbridged, but night after night, month after month, we watched and were fascinated by the slow growth of the two squat piers, then no higher than a house, that were to anchor the cables of the bridge that was to be. The spire of Trinity pricked the stars, it soared so much above its surroundings. The coastwise steamers were cockle shells; the newest ocean liner, talked of as a marvel, was less than a twelfth the size of the Olympic and of no more than half the speed of the Mauretania. All the lights the river caught were of oil and gas, yellow spots insufficient to disperse its mystery as it sobbed and swirled under the impenetrable curtain of the night. Brooklyn was peacefully, drowsily, respectably suburban; it took our tired heads on its bosom and rested them like a mother.

I never got to bed earlier than four o'clock, and had to be called at nine, because in addition to my Tribune work I was sending one weekly letter to the Boston Globe and another to the historical Galignani's Messenger in Paris. Youth is a spendthrift, and never saves itself or reckons until the mischief is done how usurious nature is with her creditors when they mortgage themselves to her.

There was security in my new position, and of course I, boy like, exaggerated its distinction and importance; but I missed the variety and freedom of my work as a space man. No other work could be more full of interest and adventure than that of a reporter who scours the city and suburbs in search of material — not the reporter who, depending on stenography, is sent out to report meetings and functions, but the casual, peripatetic observer who must discover things unforeseen, or go hungry. A paragraph or an article acquired value with the Tribune if it had some literary quality such as neatness of phrase and the flash of colour, though it might not have any bearing on the day's news. The city is packed with curiosities which the inhabitants in their haste and preoccupation do not see until their attention is called to them. When the late James R. Osgood visited Lon-don for the first time I asked him what he thought of it.

"That it had never been discovered before I got there," he replied. "There were so many things in it that I had never been told of; the hundreds of books I had read about it had not included half."

And New York, or any city, is ever new and always has fresh material to unfold to him whose observation is not obscured by familiarity or indifference.

My beat took in the wharves, the doss houses, the hospitals, the medical schools, the foreign colonies, the shops of queer trades, Castle Garden, prisons, and the morgue.

One day I visited a row of tenement houses in Willett Street, monopolized by ragpickers, who are a much cleaner and more prosperous class than inference makes them. The head man was Martin Schreiner, who told me that when he first came to America from Germany he had been employed as a domestic servant by Washington Irving at No. 3 Bridge Street, round the corner from Bowling Green, the neighbourhood of fashion and substance in those days, as it ought to be now; for where else, from the Battery to Yonkers, is there so beautiful a prospect as the queen of bays and its crescent of distant, softly moulded hills, changing in colour every hour and mixing the sweetness of country air with the breath of the sea? If I were a millionaire I'd build there now.

We sat and smoked together, Martin and I, watching the ragpickers coming home and sifting their bundles in the yard, while he held the ghost of Diedrich Knickerbocker by the coat tails. The house was not Washington's own, but that of Ebenezer Irving, his brother, and for his privacy Washington had a front room on the second floor, used in combination as sitting room, bed-room and study. Much of his time was spent there. After an early cup of coffee and a slice of dry toast with the rest of the family, it was his habit to seclude himself until eleven o'clock, and then to set forth on his morning walk in fastidious attire, as spotless and as smooth as that of a dandy. He dined with the family at three in the afternoon, drinking one glass of Madeira, one and no more. I remembered how abstemious he was — how shocked when he called on Charles Dickens in the Astor House, and Dickens instantly asked him what he would have to drink.

He was not often home to tea, but was usually in his room by nine o'clock, and again at work. The room was furnished cheerfully, with plenty of books and pictures, and in winter a blazing coal fire burned in the open grate, before which he delighted to sit. When he retired, a small table, holding writing materials, a few books, and some wax candles, was drawn to the side of the bed, and from time to time during the night, as thoughts occurred to him, they were jotted down for future use. Much of his work was done at night as he lay in his bed, and the last of the candles would some-times be aglow in the early morning.

If his ghost could have heard all that Martin said of his generosity to him and the other servants, all of whom had been in the family for long periods; of his affection for his nephews and nieces, and of his courtesy to all whom he met, I have no doubt its modesty would have compelled it to vanish sooner than it did.

At the corner of Spring and Varick Streets remained the last of the old bell towers of the fire department, surviving the days when there were no alarm boxes and no telegraph. In a box at the top of a spiral stair-way, twisting through the open frame, a watchman scanned the neighbourhood through a binocular glass, like the lookout in a cro'nest at sea, scrutinizing and weighing the possibilities of every glow and every plume of smoke, and raising a lever which rang a deep and solemn bell whenever he discovered an accidental or incendiary blaze. No candle or lamp was allowed in the tower, and the old man was glad to have me sit and smoke with him, as I often did, when night drew on, and the lights visible earlier went out faster and faster after ten o'clock. Under his rough coat he was a sentimentalist. "Yes, 'tis lonely I be when I see them go, wan by wan, like friends dying." He was an inarticulate Teufelsdrockh, and I imagined him thinking what he could not say : "Upward of five hundred thousand two-legged animals without feathers lie round us in horizontal positions, their heads all in nightcaps, and full of foolish dreams. Riot cries aloud, and staggers and swaggers in his rank dens of shame; and the mother, with streaming hair, kneels over her pallid dying infant, whose cracked lips only her tears now moisten. All these heaped and huddled together, with nothing but a little carpentry and masonry between them; crammed in like salted fish in their barrel, or weltering, shall I say? like an Egyptian pitcher of tamed vipers, each struggling to get its head above the others. Such work goes on under that smoke counterpane! But I, mein Werther, sit above it all; I am alone with the stars."

I have said that you met everybody on Broadway between Twenty-third Street and the City Hall. Walking was far more a habit as a constitutional exercise than it is now. Day after day I used to meet William Cullen Bryant on his way to or from the office of the Evening Post, diminutive, erect, keen-eyed, and buoyant, with a streaming white beard, the picture of Father Time himself; Edwin Booth, with his ivory face, abstracted, and steeped in gloom; Lester Wallack, above ordinary height, and handsome, a modern Beau Brummel, but nearly as much "made up" on the street as in the theatre, his ringlets and moustache dyed to a purplish jet, his cheeks artificially ruddy; Peter Cooper, tall but stooping and shuffling, with a long, pale, dreamy face and a snowy, blowing, uncared for beard; Roscoe Conkling, pale of face, imperious in demeanour, with a long nose that always seemed to be fishing for his chin, little different from the caricatures which represented him as a pouter pigeon; Samuel J. Tilden, small and puckered wearing an indefinable smile behind which lay the unfathomable; Dion Boucicault, floating in the music of his own brogue, round-faced, pallid, white-tied, like a priest, who could not speak without being witty and flattering; the fascinating E. A. Sothern, the original "Lord Dundreary," debonair, polished, lithe, with an English complexion and fine features, and the air of drawing-rooms rather than of the theatre; the "Count Johannes" (alias Jones), who was theatrical or nothing, the barnstormer of caricature, who played with a wire screen in front of the foot-lights to protect him from the missiles his audiences took in baskets to throw at him — the "crushed tragedian" parodied during a long season by Sothern in an amusing comedy by Byron and — "Commodore" Vanderbilt, the founder of the Vanderbilt fortunes.

The "Commodore" and I became friends. He resembled a bishop or an archbishop in his benignity and suavity. A white tie and a long black coat, like a cassock, encouraged that inference, but had you seen him any-where near the House of Lords you would have more probably taken him for an hereditary legislator, an ideal aristocrat of acres, ancient privileges, and long descent. He was neat and dapper, with a girlish complexion of pink and white, and abundant hair as soft and glossy as the down of a bird. When he smiled and bowed, it was with the air of waiting on your pleasure and being anxious to hear how he could be of service to so meritorious and distinguished a person as yourself. How could this be the old ferry-man who, scarcely more than a generation before, had sailed his sloop between the Battery and Staten Island, carrying passengers and freight at reasonable rates? The illusion lasted until he spoke, and then speech, so often the betrayer of fine appearances, put him down to the level of the gossip of the country store. Though his vocabulary was meagre, it did not lack vigour or spiciness, and eked out by slang and expletives it never left you in doubt as to his meaning.

He had a private office in a dingy, old-fashioned little house just west of Broadway in Amity Street. I think it was in Amity Street, though it may have been only contiguous to that. Inside and outside the house had the aspect of a quiet, private dwelling, and when I called, he always received me in the parlour in the most encouraging way, beaming on me as if I had been at least a promising nephew of his, or perhaps a grandson of whom he was fond and had reason to be proud.

"Sit down, sonny; sit down. Cold, ain't it?"

If the weather was at all chilly a light fire of sea-coal was sure to be burning in the grate, and he would seat me at the side of it while he stretched himself at the other and toasted his feet over the fender. His time seemed to be wholly and ungrudgingly at my disposal, as though he had nothing else to do in the world but talk to me, or listen to me. Now, I thought, I shall get something worth while, a column or two that should lead to immediate promotion for me. Then I would ply him with questions of ships, railways, politics, and finance. He listened to every question and pondered it, rubbing his hands now and then, smiling all the time the heavenly smile of a good bishop and occasionally chuckling. But he never answered me.

"That's interesting. Say! That's a poser! How did you happen to think of that, sonny? Now tell me what you think of it? — that's what I want to know. Beats the Dutch how you fellows find out all these things."

And he would rise and pat my head, or rumple my hair in an ostensible ecstasy of appreciation, without once revealing his own opinions on anything at all. He had not the faintest idea who Socrates was, but his method was Socratic. It was vexing to leave him without a line to print as the result of my call on him, which to an onlooker must have seemed so opportune for confidences and revelations. Confidences and revelations there were — mine, however, not his — and I am sure they were immeasurably less profitable to him than his would have been to me. Yet when he saw me to the door, to which I went with never a sign from him that I had outstayed my welcome, he would repeat the patting of my head, and say, "Come again, sonny," and under the charm of his geniality I would forget my disappointment.

All I ever got out of him, except the outlines of this portrait, was the warmth of that fire and his interest in me, which, flattering enough, must have been dissembled, or taken only because his heart was open to youth and my simplicity amused him. He might have put money in my purse, but I have learned by experience that rich men do not want company. They see, perhaps, a mischief in wealth which I, and many others, have not yet discerned and could readily extenuate if it were revealed in all its iniquity.

Each generation has its own pills and plasters, and its own surgeons and physicians, who, like all other public servants, distinguished and undistinguished, are displaced and forgotten by the next. If I mention Willard Parker, Lewis A. Sayre, Ogden Doremus, Alfred Loomis, Fordyce Barker, William A. Hammond, Stephen Smith, and J. C. Draper, their names will fall flat on the reader, unless he is old or middle-aged, and fail to awaken in a lay ear any echo of the reputation they had in their day. I attended the clinics and lectures, not as a student, but in the pursuit of any scenes or events which could be turned into "copy," the trade word for the written sheets which feed the insatiable, gormandizing press. I see myself again in the curious, observant groups of students going from cot to cot and from ward to ward at the heels of those professors, listening to them in the lecture room and in the operating theatre, with drawn nerves and bated breath. I suppose it is the reaction from "drawn nerves" and from the tension of their occupation and the responsibilities and solemnity of it which makes medical students so obstreperous when the strain on them ceases.

In the intermissions between lectures the air is filled with catcalls, whistling, and snatches of song. A ,sign positively forbids smoking, but they smoke, and not only smoke, but whistle, sing, and whoop. A small pillow is discovered on the rostrum, and a demure-looking youth who has spied it from afar strides over the rail and secures it. Returning to his seat, he poises it and threatens to dash it at the men in the row below him, who duck in anticipation of it, while several others in the row above, who are not threatened, grin with delight. But by a quick, sly movement he aims at the latter and it knocks the hats off at least half a dozen, and then a battle for the possession of the missile begins. It flies from head to head, and hand to hand, up the theatre, down the theatre, and diagonally; it sends a plug hat spinning, and brings colour into many faces, and its course is followed by shrieks of laughter, mingled with catcalls. The pursuit of it becomes fierce; but after a lapse of five minutes a whirring electric bell is heard, and the game is abandoned.

A portly gentleman enters the stage, who from the firmness of his tread and the erectness of his body might be a general reviewing his troops. He is massively built, and has a full, round face, a clipped head, and a heavy moustache. He is dressed in a fashionable frock-coat and light trousers. His hair is nearly gray, and as he strides across the stage, waiting for the applause to cease, he looks "more like a general than ever. His manner somehow implies that time is very precious with him, and he talks in a rapid but rather husky voice. Time is precious with him; his private practice is enormous, and patients come thousands of miles to see him. It is wonderful that he finds time for the college; but, more than that, he is a voluminous writer of books on his specialty, and a famous entertainer.

He writes novels, too, just to show his literary friends, he tells them, how easy novel writing is and how vain-glorious they are in making much of it. This is Surgeon-General William A. Hammond, the celebrated neurologist, lecturer on diseases of the mind and nervous system.

Then the professor of chemistry appears, Dr. R. Ogden Doremus. He is over six feet in height — a graceful man, with easy manners and a pleasant face.

The left sleeve of his frock-coat is empty, and swings loosely as he bends over the table, but he manages his right arm and left armpit so cleverly that his deficiency causes him very little inconvenience. His voice is agreeable and his phrases are well chosen. From time to time he interpolates a humorous suggestion or allusion, as, in describing the various sources of lime, he exhibits an oyster shell, and regrets that it is not a half shell with a Shrewsbury on it. He speaks vivaciously, and the hour slips by very pleasantly; he bows gracefully and retires; the blackboard doors close again, and again the students lapse into babel.

Another lecturer: his hands are in his pockets; he saunters in, and you expect him to yawn. But he is one of the busiest of men; his manner belies him. A smile plays about his face, from which flows a patriarchal beard; his eyes twinkle, and his voice is pleasant. He beckons the students who are scattered, urging them to fill the front rows.

"Come down here and I'll ask you questions; it's the best thing in the world for you."

In their own vernacular, the students do not "see it"; they are not anxious to be quizzed, but after some further pressure they draw themselves together. He begins the lecture with an interrogation, and one of the audience essays an answer without premeditation. "Hold on!" cries the professor good-naturedly; "it isn't half as easy as that. I twisted it to make it interesting for you." And the proper answer is some time in forthcoming. When the answer is given, the professor adds to it, eliminates words inexact in meaning, and substitutes others precisely correct; by hints and signs he attracts a blunderer from a false conclusion to a proper one; and, having drawn him to that point, he expands it with fluency and emphasis, as he walks to and fro across the rostrum, now beating his hand on the rail in accentuation of the syllables, then folding his arms as he sits on the corner of a table and expounds the electric and chemic laws with the bland simplicity of a gossip at the club.

He is Dr. John C. Draper, the renowned chemist, whose father, a member of the same faculty, was the first to photograph the human countenance.

The students were from all parts of the world, even from Ceylon, Siam, and South Australia. Many of the native Americans were the sons of small farmers , and artisans of the Southern and Western states. They lived on four or five dollars a week in shabby boarding houses, and trudged through the winter's snow and ice to lectures and demonstrations without overcoats and in leaky boots, reading at night by the light of candles or kerosene lamps in their cold and gloomy attics. Some of the faculty were of similarly humble origin. Professor Lewis A. Sayre, for instance, had sprung from Kentucky, a raw, uncouth, unlettered boy, with not more than two or three dollars a week above his tuition fees, and no cheese to his bread. He had no time to ac-quire the insinuating, caressing, cooing polish of the bedside manner, and he despised it. He was loud and impetuous; a giant in figure, tempestuous and overwhelming in his heartiness outside the hospital. If you saw him coming you stopped and threw up your hands, or tucked them under your arms, or behind your back, to save them from. a crushing, excruciating grasp which once learned could not be forgotten or permitted again. Yet he was at the head of his profession.

The city ended at Fifty-ninth Street. William Black described it as Paris with a touch of the backwoods; another visitor's simile was, "A savage in his war paint, showing dirt beneath his feathers, beads, and trinkets." The tunnel and the station at Forty-second Street were unfinished. The trains came in and out on the surface to and from the terminus on the site of the Madison Square Garden. Above Fifty-ninth Street on both sides of the Park spread Shantytown, reaching to Harlem and Manhattanville. Streets had been graded and paved over a wide area, through the speculations of Tweed and Company, but there were no houses on them; many people smiled and declared there never would be any houses; that the work and material had been thrown away at the impulse of a grafter's dream.

All down in the hollows, between the graded streets, thousands and thousands of acres were under cultivation by squatters, and without other inclosure to the land than the embankments formed around the hollows by the foundations of the streets. Agriculture was carried on with primitive simplicity and under a picturesqueness of condition that set an artist on the edge of desire. Many square miles were green with vegetables. You saw the gardeners with their wives and mothers bending to their work; you heard the cackling of geese, the clutter of fowls, and the squealing of pigs. The dwellings might have been blown together out of scrap heaps. Chimneys were made of old stove and drain pipes, roofs of tarpaulin, threadbare bits of carpets, and rotten can-vas, where now are the palaces of multi-millionaires. Though the tenants were squatters, and understood the precariousness of their holdings, they resisted eviction at the point of the knife and the muzzles of guns.

I discovered "copy" there also. All was fish. that came to my net, all grist that came to my mill. But Broadway was my gold coast, my Spanish Main, which I, the beach comber, patrolled with an open, comprehensive eye for the flotsam and jetsam unseen or misprized by others.

If we could step back into the past from to-day, the first impression of change in the city would strike through the ear: it would be of quietude; and next would be of room to spare and the absence of density and pressure, though we of that time, sufficient unto ourselves, never anticipated that the future would impute to us less bustle and less noise than its own. There were no shops east or west of Broadway above Fourteenth Street. Madison Square and Union Square were surrounded by the houses of the well-to-do, which also lined the side streets in stiff, regimental uniformity. Here and there whitish sandstone or marble was used, as in the Stewart palace, with which we reduced the stranger within the gates to humility; but it was the era of brown-stone, and the "brownstone front," symbolizing elegance, respectability, and opulence, frowned down upon us, or smiled if we were friends, wherever we went. Each house was just like its neighbours; it had a high stoop and a frescoed vestibule of pseudo Arabesque design, and in spring and autumn evenings, when the warmth was premature or outrunning the season, the family assembled on the steps and, bareheaded, received callers or chatted among themselves without any prejudice against the sacrifice of privacy. Charming indeed were those stoops as one saw them in the languorous dusk and overheard the whispers and laughter of young men and groups of girls in white, butterfly dresses.

I read in the window of a shop displaying imitation brilliants, "Wear diamonds; they show you are prosperous." The motto of that generation, was "Always live in a brownstone house, and your social position will be assured."

The houses were not closed from May to October or November, as those in fashionable localities are now. The summer holidays usually began with July and ended with August, and the people went no farther than Sara-toga, Long Branch, Lake George, Delaware Water Gap, Richfield Springs, or Newport. A score of bathing-houses and half-a-dozen refreshment saloons provided for the few who drifted down to the solitary white beaches of Rockaway and Coney Island. One steamer, sailing once in six weeks, sufficed for all the cabin passengers bound for the Mediterranean. Such a ship as the Kaiserin Augusta Victoria or the Adriatic could have easily accommodated more than all who went to Europe in the busiest week in the height of the season. We were rudimentary, not cosmopolitan, hardly metropolitan, conscious of latent power and of a future, but mean-while quite satisfied with our achievements and progress, conceited about them indeed, and ready to pooh-pooh those visionaries who strove to increase the pace.

The ancient stages which rattled us between Fulton Ferry, South Ferry, and Twenty-third Street did not seem so very slow after all, though they took forty minutes for each journey, and we did not complain, though every minute of the forty put us through an agonizing apprehension of dislocated bones. As we landed at the ferry, a weedy, gray, melancholy old tout hailed us.

"Right up Broadway ! Right up Broadway!"

I never heard him say more or less than that, and he was always there — silent but for the monotony of his cry, and lost in his inner depths. He was a veteran of the Civil War. I imagined all the details of his life without questioning him, or verifying them, and put him into a story, imitatively Dickensian, which moved me, though it may have drawn no tears from others. I pictured him dying in his attic, wasted and forsaken, and murmuring with his last breath as the celestial dawn opened, "Right up Broadway!"

Dickens led not me alone, but many older and more experienced authors — Aldrich with his "Quite So," for example into pathos of that shallow and unconvincing sort.

Can the reader of the present time believe that in those days there was but one respectable table d'hτte in all the town? —"Fanny's " in University Place, where as we dined we said, "How like France!" though we had never been in France then. Delmonico's stood at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue, with a bit of a lawn in front of it, on which tables were set in mild weather. English chop-houses, with sanded floors, old prints, and Toby mugs, abounded George Browne's Green Room in the rear of old Wallack's Theatre, Farrish's in John Street, The De Soto in Bleecker Street, and the Shakespeare Inn, which you entered through a long, mysterious passage from Thirteenth Street. In winter you could see behind every bar a steaming brass or copper urn, its rim loaded with pulpy, baking apples. Gone is the savour of the apple toddy, that odorous brew in which you mixed bits of the hot fruit with boiling water, sugar, and the fragrant spirit distilled from orchards and matured in sherry casks. The scent of the orchard in blossom, and a vision of all the country in vernal loveliness, thrilled you as that nectar touched your lips.

The theatrical profession had no clubs like The Lambs and The Players. After the play the actors gathered in the chop-houses, especially at Browne's, Browne himself being a member of Wallack's company, a fat, ruddy little Englishman who played no part truer than that of host. The fitful wind of remembrance (I borrow the significant phrase from F. B. Sanborn) has brushed them all away into the limbo of phantoms — William Davidge, Charles Fisher, John Gilbert, Harry Beckett, Charles Leclerc, and John Brougham. A biographical dictionary of the stage must be consulted if you want to learn of their triumphs.

Wallack's was the theatre of triumphs, of the new plays of H. J. Byron and T. W. Robertson, and of annual revivals of the old comedies, Sheridan's, Goldsmith's, Congreve's, Farquhar's, and Garrick's. Everybody of note in town was present on "first nights," and every-body knew everybody else. Those celebrated occasions had the aspect of family gatherings through the intimacy of the audience with one another and with the actors themselves. The actors played at the audience more than they would be allowed to do now, and they were as much welcomed for their personality as for their impersonations. Melodrama could seldom be seen on those classic boards, yet it was at Wallack's that Dion Boucicault gave the first performance of "The Shaugraun." What a red-letter night that was — the house overflowing, the interest and the merriment climbing and growing till our limp, spent bodies ached!

"What have you got to say for yourself, Con?" the stern, accusing priest asks that most delightful of vaga bonds, and he, hanging his tousled head, confesses, "Divil a word, your riverence. " So when we summoned Boucicault before the curtain, bawling at him in our transports, calling for a speech and for a long time making a speech impossible, he, clothed in the shreds and patches of the part, responded in the sweet, endearing brogue which he could never get rid of, though he believed he left it behind him at the stage door, quoting the same lines, .and putting the audience in the place of the priest and himself in the place of the culprit.

"Shun the theatre. It is the gate of hell!" a Puritanical aunt of mine used to warn me in my earlier boyhood. If she could have looked into that sea of happy faces, heard those peals of guileless laughter, and known how such pleasures abate the rancours of this tough world her fanaticism must have yielded.

It is not impossible that a supercilious youth of the twentieth century, could he see us as we were in the seventies, would think us discreditably behind hand and say that he had no use for "hayseeds." We talked of rapid transit less confidently than people talk now of commercial aviation and of harnessing the winds and the tides. Those who had been in London hoped that some day we might have something like the old underground railway of that city, and would have accounted it a boon despite its general nastiness. A glimmer of what the womb of the future might produce came from an experimental length of a pneumatic line under Broadway near the Astor House.

You went down a few stairs and entered from a platform a roomy, circular car, seated in which you and a dozen other venturous passengers were drawn a hundred yards or so, and then hauled back into the station.