ointed paths.
For the car, now turned cityward, had rolled but a few rods when a smell
of overheated metals assailed the air, and with a tired wheezing
somewhere down in its vital organs, the automobile halted itself. The
chauffeur spent some time tinkering among its innermost works before he
stood up, hot and sweaty and disgusted, to announce that the breakdown
was serious in character. He undertook to explain in highly technical
terms the exact nature of the trouble, but his master had no turn for
mechanics and small patience for listening. He gathered that it would
take at least an hour to mend the mishap, perhaps even longer, and he
was not minded to wait.

"I'll walk across yonder and catch the subway," he said. "You mend the
car and bring it downtown when you get it mended."

At its farthest point north, the Broadway subway, belying its name,
emerges from the earth and becomes an elevated structure, rearing high
above the ground. Its northernmost station stands aloft, butt-ended and
pierced with many windows, like a ferry-boat cabin set up on stilts.
Through a long aisle of sun-dried trees, Judson Green made for this
newly risen landmark. A year or two years before, all this district had
been well wooded and sparsely inhabited. But wherever a transit line
goes in New York it works changes in the immediate surroundings, and
here at this particular spot, the subway was working them, and many of
them. Through truck patches and strips of woodland, cross-streets were
being cut, and on the hills to the westward, tall apartment houses were
going up. On the raw edge of a cut, half of an old wooden mansion stood,
showing tattered strips of an ancient flowered wallpaper and a
fireplace, clinging like a chimney-swift's nest to a wall, where the
rest of the room had been sheared away bodily. Along Broadway, beyond a
huddle of merry-go-rounds and peanut stands, a row of shops had sprung
up, as it were, overnight; they were shiny, trim, citified shops,
looking a trifle strange now in this half-transformed setting, but sure
to have plenty of neighbours before long. There was even a barber shop,
glittering inside and out with the neatness of newness, and complete,
even to a manicuring table and a shoe-shining stand. The door of the
shop was open; within, electric fans whirred in little blurs of rapid
movement.

See now how chance still served our young man: Crossing to the station,
Judson Green took note of this barber shop an