away, scared at last, to more inaccessible haunts.

But on one particularly jolly evening, to return to a text memories of
tried friends and happy hours have beguiled me from, among a number of
notable guests one who "favored," Mr. Wilton Lackaye, then appearing
as that white-eyed, hairy, awful _Svengali_ everybody so loathed and
applauded, dramatically recited a remarkable and original poem called
the "Song of Broadway." Many a time since have I remembered the scene,
the song, the company; the long, wine-stained tables, the eddying
cigarette smoke, the acute, lively faces. In one way or another,
everyone there was a trained observer, and knew his Broadway.

It is rather a bold thing to say you know your Broadway. As I, too,
sing my song about it, if I sound a note once or twice you have never
heard, oh, thank Heaven, and turn away! With us, I trust, it will be
but a minor chord. So every stroller there recognized the world he
lives in, and the child, the mother, the cabby, gambler, pickpocket,
doctor, parson, each carries off his or her own bundle of impressions.

Leaving it, then, to graver historians to trace the financial,
commercial and social evolution of this tremendous street, which was a
forest trail once, within whose sylvan solitudes red men roamed and
wild beasts prowled, let us from our humble station, as men of the
world and social philosophers, describe merely that stretch of it
which begins at Madison Square and ends at Forty-fifth Street; where
it is high noon at eight o'clock at night, and bedtime when the gray
dawn comes shivering cold and ghastly into hotel corridors where the
washerwomen are scrubbing the marble floors. "Little old Broadway," as
it is affectionately toasted in the vernacular of its _habitues_,
wherever rye whisky is drunk, and faithful homesick hearts recall its
lights, its pleasures and its crowds.

Broadway, I say, at eight o'clock at night, is the most fascinating
street on earth. It is _en fete_ every evening; and you have only to
walk that mile often enough, and the whole town will display itself at
leisure and at its ease, perfectly unconscious and natural and
selfish. It is not the lights; it is not the brilliant hotels, and
theaters, and restaurants, and shops, and tramcars, and hurrying cabs;
it is not the music that floats out to you on the rippling surface of
the town's deep voice; it is not that voice itself, vibrating as it is
with every emotion of the human heart,