of pleasure, excitement,
careless gayety, shame that has ceased to care, lust whispering its
appeal, modesty's shocked sigh, innocence's happy prattle, kind
laughter, friendly chat, unexpected hearty greetings; it is the vast,
shifting, jostling, loitering, idle crowd, the multitude of a huge
cosmopolitan city that is the spectacle, and that to a man who knows
his town is more dramatic, and humorous, and pathetic, and fascinating
than all the plays to which young ladies, and their papas, too, are
hurrying, to thrill, and laugh, and cry over.

Think of a mile of street, brilliant like a drawing room almost, and
swarming with all kinds of men and women from all over the world, each
seeking his or her particular amusement and finding it. Pleasure is
the commodity on sale here, and one can obtain it at any of those
glittering signs blazing out over the crush, or traffic in it with the
venders of the pavement.

Isn't it marvelous? Isn't it wonderful? as the conjurer says when he
cuts your watch out of an onion. Mr. Conjurer returns your watch in
safety, but it retains that delicate perfume which only the time it
chronicles can wear away. Many an ingenious traveler has stepped out
of his hotel to watch this magic spectacle for a little, and brought
back with him bitter remembrances that all the tears shed secretly
won't ever wash out.

_Tant pis!_ You are not a preacher, monsieur. There is only one church
on your Broadway, and that is dark and shut and sold to a syndicate.
The only religion one gets here is the Bibles in the hotel bedrooms,
and at Jerry McAuley's Cremorne Mission, round the corner in
Thirty-second Street. What, then? Nobody claims Broadway to be a
domestic scene, and children and nursemaids don't constitute its
charm.

Look north, from where we have turned into it, after lighting our
cigars at Van Valkenburg's, under the Albemarle Hotel, and those
dazzling signs will tell you what most people come here for: Martin's,
Weber's Music Hall, the Imperial Hotel, the Knickerbocker Theater,
with Mr. Sothern in "Hamlet," Hoster's, Kid McCoy's Cafe, Brown's Chop
House, Grand Opera, Rector's Restaurant--to dine, to drink, to smoke,
to stroll, to see the play, to watch each other. Did you ever see so
much light, so much life? Halt where sedate business halts, too, at
the St. James Building, frowning darkly down on gay, hoydenish
Martin's, whose roguish, Parisian eyes twinkle mischievously up at it,
as if they know