ul at all, a mere ganglion,
a quivering, pressed-in nerve of second-story windows, skies of
clotheslines, pale faces, mist and rumble and dust. "Perhaps I have a
soul," I say. "Perhaps I have not. Has any one a soul?" When I look at
the men I say to myself, "Now I will look at the women," and when I look
at the women I say, "Now I will look at the men." Then I look at shoes.
Men are cheap in New York. Every little man I see stewing along the
street, when I look into his face in my long, slow country way, as if a
hill belonged with him or a scrap of sky or something, or as if he
really counted, looks at me as one would say, "I? I am a millionth of
New York--and you?"

I am not even that. The city gathers itself together in a great roar
about me, puts its hands to its mouth and bellows in my country ears,
"Men are cheap enough, dear boy, didn't you know that? See those dots on
Brooklyn Bridge?"

I go on with my walk. I stop and look up at the great blocks. "Who are
you?" the great blocks say. I take another step. I am one more shuffle
on the street. "Men are cheap. Look at _us_--" a thousand show windows
say. Are there not square miles of human countenance drifting up
Broadway any day? "And where are they going?" I asked my soul. "To
oblivion?"--"They are going from Things," said my soul, "to Things"; and
_sotto voce_, "From one set of Things they know they do not want, to
another set of Things they do not know they do not want."

One need not wonder very long that nearly every man one knows in New
York is at best a mere cheered-up and plucky pessimist. Of course one
has to go down and see one's favourite New Yorker, one needs to and
wants to, and one needs to get wrought in with him too, but when one
gets home, who is there who does not have to get free from his favourite
New Yorker, shake himself off from him, save his soul a little longer?
"Men are cheap," it keeps saying over and over to one,--a New York soul
does. It keeps coming back--whispering through all the aisles of
thought. New York spreads itself like a vast concrete philosophy over
every man's spirit. It reeks with cheapness, human cheapness. How could
it be otherwise with a New York man? I never come home from New York,
wander through the city with my heart, afterward, look down upon it, see
Broadway with this little man on it, fretting up and down between his
twenty-story blocks, in his little trough of din under the wide heaven,
loomed at by iron and g