men collect
books. They are amateurs of London. Year by year they add precious
souvenirs to their rich collections, the find of an old passage way
here, there the view when the light is quite right from one precise
spot, say, on Waterloo Bridge. Sometimes, indeed, they write books
about their hobby, more or less useful to the neophyte: as "A
Wayfarer's London," or "A Wanderer in London," or "Ghosts of
Piccadilly," or some such thing; but more frequently they are of the
highest type of amateur, the connoisseur who will gladly share his joy
in his treasures with a cultivated friend but has nothing of his love
to sell. I doubt whether there are any such amateurs of New York, any
who for thirty years and more have walked our streets as an
intellectual sport with unabated zest. London, of course, has the drop
on us in the matter of richness of material for this sort of collector,
but there is plenty to bag at home. Not far from the corner of
Broadway and Fulton Street, I recollect, is a queer place called
Vandewater Street.

Some twenty years or so ago you used to go to melodramas, real
melodramas. There are aesthetic revivals of melodrama in Boston, I
hear. There was nothing aesthetic about the ones I mean, and the
enjoyment of them was untainted by the malady of thought. Come along
now. We'll dive through Park Row and turn here down Frankfort Street.
Few do turn down Frankfort Street, and I fear its admirable points are
unappreciated. For one thing, it goes down, down, down a very steep
incline; which is a spirited thing for a street to do, I think. And it
is very narrow, at the beginning, with sidewalks that hug the walls,
and is always in shadow, so that it has a fine, wild, villainous look.
Horses climbing it always come with a plunge and a grinding of sparks.
And the roar from the cobble stones is deafening, very stimulating to
the imagination. The atmosphere is one of typefounders, leather,
hides, and oyster houses.

Very few people, I fancy, could tell you where there is a portcullis in
New York just like the one at a gateway in The Tower. But if you snook
around the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge you'll find one, with a
winding stair disappearing beyond it, and mounting, presumably, to a
dungeon. Newswomen, I think, are pleasanter to see than newsboys.
There is a newsgirl who minds a stand here at the corner of Rose and
Frankfort Streets who is charming as a type of 'Arriet. She always
wears an eno