ide street, and disappear with him in the darkness.

Towards eleven o'clock the theatres pour out their throngs of spectators,
who come to swell the crowd on Broadway, and for a little while the noise
and confusion are almost as great as in the day. Then the restaurants
will close, and the street will gradually become deserted and dark,
tenanted only by the giant policemen; and for a few hours the great city
will be wrapped in silence and slumber.

VI. SOCIETY.

I. ANALYTICAL.

All the world over, poverty is a misfortune. In New York it is a crime.
Here, as in no other place in the country, men struggle for wealth. They
toil, they suffer privations, they plan and scheme, and execute with a
persistency that often wins the success they covet. The chief effort of
every man and woman in the great city is to secure wealth. Man is a
social being--woman much more so--and here wealth is an absolute
necessity to the enjoyment of social pleasures. Society here is
organized upon a pecuniary basis, and stands not as it should upon the
personal merits of those who compose it, but upon a pile of bank-books.
In other cities, poor men, who are members of families which command
respect for their talents or other admirable qualities, or who have merit
of their own sufficient to entitle them to such recognition, are welcomed
into what are called the "Select Circles" with as much cordiality as
though they were millionaires. In New York, however, men and women are
judged by their bank accounts. The most illiterate boor, the most
unprincipled knave finds the door of fashion open to him, while St. Peter
himself, if he came "without purse or scrip," would see it closed in his
face.

Society in New York is made up of many elements, the principal of which
it is proposed to examine, but, unfortunately, wealth is the one thing
needful in most of the classes into which it is divided. Nor is this
strange. The majority of fashionable people have never known any of the
arts and refinements of civilization except those which mere wealth can
purchase. Money raised them from the dregs of life, and they are firm
believers in it. Without education, without social polish, they see
themselves courted and fawned upon for their wealth, and they naturally
suppose that there is nothing else "good under the sun."

Those who claim precedence base their demand upon their descent from the
original Dutch settlers, and style themselves "t