y connected with
dollars, it was a city to dwell in and make money in, but hardly a
city to _live_ in. The millionaires were building white-marble
palaces, taxing the ingenuity and the originality of the native
architects, and thus to some extent relieving the general ugliness
and drab commonplaceness, while the merchant princes had begun to
invade the lower end of the avenue with handsome shops. But in
spite of all this, in spite of its pretty girls--and Jefferson
insisted that in this one important particular New York had no
peer--in spite of its comfortable theatres and its wicked
Tenderloin, and its Rialto made so brilliant at night by thousands
of elaborate electric signs, New York still had the subdued air of
a provincial town, compared with the exuberant gaiety, the
multiple attractions, the beauties, natural and artificial, of
cosmopolitan Paris.

The boulevards were crowded, as usual at that hour, and the
crush of both vehicles and pedestrians was so great as to
permit of only a snail-like progress. The clumsy three-horse
omnibuses--Madeleine-Bastille--crowded inside and out with
passengers and with their neatly uniformed drivers and conductors,
so different in appearance and manner from our own slovenly
street-car rowdies, were endeavouring to breast a perfect sea of
_fiacres_ which, like a swarm of mosquitoes, appeared to be trying
to go in every direction at once, their drivers vociferating
torrents of vituperous abuse on every man, woman or beast
unfortunate enough to get in their way. As a dispenser of
unspeakable profanity, the Paris _cocher_ has no equal. He is
unique, no one can approach him. He also enjoys the reputation of
being the worst driver in the world. If there is any possible way
in which he can run down a pedestrian or crash into another
vehicle he will do it, probably for the only reason that it gives
him another opportunity to display his choice stock of picturesque
expletives.

But it was a lively, good-natured crowd and the fashionably gowned
women and the well-dressed men, the fakirs hoarsely crying their
catch-penny devices, the noble boulevards lined as far as the eye
could reach with trees in full foliage, the magnificent Opera
House with its gilded dome glistening in the warm sunshine of a
June afternoon, the broad avenue directly opposite, leading in a
splendid straight line to the famous Palais Royal, the almost
dazzling whiteness of the houses and monuments, the remarkable
c