needs attention from a dentist; like a
cemetery that is all monuments and no gravestones. But at night, seen
from the river where they are columns towering against the sky,
all sparkling with light, they are fairylike; they are beauty more
satisfactory to the soul and more enchanting than anything that man has
dreamed of since the Arabian nights. We can't always have the beautiful
aspect of things. Let us make the most of our sights that are beautiful
and let the others go. When your foreigner makes disagreeable comments
on New York by daylight, float him down the river at night.

What has made these sky-scrapers possible is the elevator. The cigar-box
which the European calls a "lift" needs but to be compared with our
elevators to be appreciated. The lift stops to reflect between floors.
That is all right in a hearse, but not in elevators. The American
elevator acts like the man's patent purge--it worked. As the inventor
said, "This purge doesn't waste any time fooling around; it attends
strictly to business."

That New-Yorkers have the cleanest, quickest, and most admirable system
of street railways in the world has been forced upon you by the abnormal
appreciation you have of your hackman. We ought always to be grateful to
him for that service. Nobody else would have brought such a system into
existence for us. We ought to build him a monument. We owe him one as
much as we owe one to anybody. Let it be a tall one. Nothing permanent,
of course; build it of plaster, say. Then gaze at it and realize how
grateful we are--for the time being--and then pull it down and throw it
on the ash-heap. That's the way to honor your public heroes.

As to our streets, I find them cleaner than they used to be. I miss
those dear old landmarks, the symmetrical mountain ranges of dust and
dirt that used to be piled up along the streets for the wind and rain
to tear down at their pleasure. Yes, New York is cleaner than Bombay. I
realize that I have been in Bombay, that I now am in New York; that it
is not my duty to flatter Bombay, but rather to flatter New York.

Compared with the wretched attempts of London to light that city, New
York may fairly be said to be a well-lighted city. Why, London's attempt
at good lighting is almost as bad as London's attempt at rapid transit.
There is just one good system of rapid transit in London--the "Tube,"
and that, of course, had been put in by Americans. Perhaps, after a
while, those Americans wil