etual congestion. I had often pondered as to where 30
these millions hung their wash, when they washed. To-day
I learned.

Arranged in crisscross rows, compactly and without wasting
an inch of space, that I could see, the roofs of the East
Side were literally covered, literally littered, with clothes
of a sameness that made of whole blocks or squares an
awning. Here and there a red shirt, the only outstanding 5
bit of color. At least I chose to assume that it was a shirt
because I knew that down in those narrow streets, moving
about like minute grains of sand guided only by the confines
of the conventional walls, were people sweltering in
the heat of a summer day, and they needed those shirts 10
another season.

We dropped lower. We saw between the lines of garments,
as we gazed straight downward, a bed, another bed,
then a cot, more beds, a chair or two, now and then a bit
of green I took to be plants, occasionally a bit of carpet 15
on the roof--and babies. The ten or fifteen babies who
do not spend their days in the middle of the streets are
enjoying the pleasures of their own roof gardens. As far
as we could see to the left it was the same--roofs and
clothes and babies, divided into squares like cuts of frosted 20
cake.

We struck Fifth Avenue at 110 Street. To our right
was Central Park. And it was not as large as the palm of
one's hand. In fact it might have been a bare spot from
which a few building blocks had been lifted, evenly and 25
without disturbing the sharply outlined sides and corners.

There was nothing to be seen of the beautiful drives.
The wonderful trees were as clumps of sagebrush, the
gathering spots mere splotches of gray in a patch of moldy
green. The lakes and the reservoir were as bits of broken 30
glass with jagged edges and no reason on earth for their
being there.

Below us we did make out a few of the taller buildings,
but it required an effort and a prior knowledge of their location.
Fifth Avenue, over which we were traveling at
ninety miles an hour as we tacked across the pathway of
the wind and sped southward, was like any other street 5
from that height. One could never recognize it as Fifth
Avenue, though in front of the Public Library the limousines
forming two thin lines like black threads helped identi