clung to the safety of one of the L posts as the traffic surged past.
The clang of surface cars and the throb of motors filled the air
constantly. He wondered at the daring of a pink-cheeked slip of a girl
driving an automobile with sure touch through all this tangle of
traffic. While he waited to plunge across the street there came a roar
overhead that reminded him again of a wall of water he had once heard
tearing down a canon in his home land.

Instinctively one arm clutched at the post. A monster went flying
through the air with a horrible, grinding menace. It was only the
Elevated on its way uptown. Clay looked around in whimsical admiration
of the hurrying people about him. None of them seemed aware either of
the noise or the crush of vehicles. They went on their preoccupied way
swiftly and surely.

"I never did see such a town, and me just hittin' the fringes of it
yet," Clay moaned aloud in comic despair, unaware that even New York
has no noisier street than Sixth Avenue.

Chance swept him up Sixth to Herald Square. He was caught in the river
of humanity that races up Broadway. His high-heeled boots clicked on
the pavement of one of the world's great thoroughfares as far as
Forty-Second Street. Under the shadow of the Times Building he stopped
to look about him. Motor-cars, street-cars, and trucks rolled past in
endless confusion. Every instant the panorama shifted, yet it was
always the same. He wondered where all this rush of people was going.
What crazy impulses sent them surging to and fro? And the girls--Clay
surrendered to them at discretion. He had not supposed there were so
many pretty, well-dressed girls in the world.

"I reckon money grows on trees in New York," he told himself aloud with
a grin.

Broadway fascinated him. He followed it uptown toward Longacre Circle.
The street was as usual in a state of chronic excavation. His foot
slipped and he fell into a trench while trying to cross. When he
emerged it was with a pound or two of Manhattan mud on his corduroy
suit. He looked at himself again with a sense that his garb did not
quite measure up to New York standards.

"First off I'm goin' to get me a real city suit of clothes," he
promised himself. "This here wrinkled outfit is some too woolly for
the big town. It's a good suit yet--'most as good as when I bought it
at the Boston Store in Tucson three years ago. But I reckon I'll save
it to go home in."

To a policeman