come here, and I should think they would all love it.
This part of Broadway is nicknamed the Rialto. Nowhere else are they
taken so cordially and frankly by the hand. They lounge about it by
day and win fame and fortune in its theaters at night. Nat Goodwin and
his wife, Hackett and Mary Mannering--when they can meet--Sir Henry
Irving, De Wolf Hopper, Miss Annie Russell, bowing to Charles Richman
out of a cab, Amelia Bingham, Joseph Jefferson, whose only fault is
that he isn't immortal, and funny, rollicking Fay Templeton, humming a
new coon song--old favorites and new ones, you may see them going to
supper at the Lambs' Club, the Players, the Waldorf, Delmonico's,
Sherry's, any evening they are in town.

Broadway is darker. The theater lights are out. Only bars and
apothecaries, shops and hotels, are brilliant. The opera is over, and
carriages are whirling away toward Fifth Avenue, and tramcars crawling
along in procession, packed to the platforms with gayly dressed
passengers. Across the way from Macy's huge dark store, the _Herald_
presses are rushing off the biography of the day in sight of
everybody, and no philosopher moralizes on that awful, tremendous
record of four-and-twenty hours of a whole world's work, play, crime,
suffering, heroism, love, faith.

Our fast friends must tremble as they pass those windows, and remember
the relentless, watchful eyes forever fixed on them. The ladies and
gentlemen of this society dine at Shanley's and Rector's, and call
supper _lunch_. Except that they are more painstakingly dressed, they
don't look very different from others. I have often thought that such
a congregation might gather in Trinity Chapel, say, and be preached to
by an innocent clergyman with a weary sense of the futility of trying
to make such evidently virtuous persons penitent.

Should you like to really know them? They are thick about you on every
hand. Drama and tragedy and pathos are in rehearsal now; and that old
comedy of "A Fool and His Money." Walk a few blocks with the night
clerk of Wilson's chemist shop. Get to know the bookmaker coming out
of George Considine's Metropole bar, chat with our acquaintance, the
plainclothes man. Join that man-about-town, on his way to the Astoria
Club. Masks will be torn off then, every actor will be seen as he is.
That family coachman is a burglar just out of Auburn. That thin, alert
gentleman in evening clothes is a gambler, getting a breath of air
before taking hi