York'; and I knew that the
name had been found. There are no paints dry enough to describe all that
dry light; and it is not a box of colours but of crayons. If the
Englishman returning to England is moved at the sight of a block of
white chalk, the American sees rather a bundle of chalks. Nor can I
imagine anything more moving. Fairy tales are told to children about a
country where the trees are like sugar-sticks and the lakes like
treacle, but most children would feel almost as greedy for a fairyland
where the trees were like brushes of green paint and the hills were of
coloured chalks.

But here what accentuates this arid freshness is the fragmentary look of
the continual reconstruction and change. The strong daylight finds
everywhere the broken edges of things, and the sort of hues we see in
newly-turned earth or the white sections of trees. And it is in this
respect that the local colour can literally be taken as local character.
For New York considered in itself is primarily a place of unrest, and
those who sincerely love it, as many do, love it for the romance of its
restlessness. A man almost looks at a building as he passes to wonder
whether it will be there when he comes back from his walk; and the doubt
is part of an indescribable notion, as of a white nightmare of daylight,
which is increased by the very numbering of the streets, with its tangle
of numerals which at first makes an English head reel. The detail is
merely a symbol; and when he is used to it he can see that it is, like
the most humdrum human customs, both worse and better than his own. '271
West 52nd Street' is the easiest of all addresses to find, but the
hardest of all addresses to remember. He who is, like myself, so
constituted as necessarily to lose any piece of paper he has particular
reason to preserve, will find himself wishing the place were called
'Pine Crest' or 'Heather Crag' like any unobtrusive villa in Streatham.
But his sense of some sort of incalculable calculations, as of the
vision of a mad mathematician, is rooted in a more real impression. His
first feeling that his head is turning round is due to something really
dizzy in the movement of a life that turns dizzily like a wheel. If
there be in the modern mind something paradoxical that can find peace in
change, it is here that it has indeed built its habitation or rather is
still building and unbuilding it. One might fancy that it changes in
everything and that nothing endu