: "Do you give transfers down Twenty-eighth
Street?"

Some time the conductor breaks the bell strap when he pulls it under
these conditions. Then, as the car goes on, he goes and bullies some
person who had nothing to do with the affair.

The car sweeps on its diagonal path through the Tenderloin with its
hotels, its theatres, its flower shops, its 10,000,000 actors who played
with Booth and Barret. It passes Madison Square and enters the gorge
made by the towering walls of great shops. It sweeps around the double
curve at Union Square and Fourteenth Street, and a life insurance agent
falls in a fit as the car dashes over the crossing, narrowly missing
three old ladies, two old gentlemen, a newly-married couple, a sandwich
man, a newsboy, and a dog. At Grace Church the conductor has an
altercation with a brave and reckless passenger who beards him in his
own car, and at Canal Street he takes dire vengeance by tumbling a
drunken man on to the pavement. Meanwhile, the gripman has become
involved with countless truck drivers, and inch by inch, foot by foot,
he fights his way to City Hall Park. On past the Post Office the car
goes, with the gripman getting advice, admonition, personal comment, an
invitation to fight from the drivers, until Battery Park appears at the
foot of the slope, and as the car goes sedately around the curve the
burnished shield of the bay shines through the trees.

It is a great ride, full of exciting actions. Those inexperienced
persons who have been merely chased by Indians know little of the
dramatic quality which life may hold for them. These jungle of men and
vehicles, these canyons of streets, these lofty mountains of iron and cut
stone--a ride through them affords plenty of excitement. And no lone
panther's howl is more serious in intention than the howl of the truck
driver when the cable car bumps one of his rear wheels.

Owing to a strange humour of the gods that make our comfort, sailor hats
with wide brims come into vogue whenever we are all engaged in hanging
to cable-car straps. There is only one more serious combination known to
science, but a trial of it is at this day impossible. If a troupe of
Elizabethan courtiers in large ruffs should board a cable car, the
complication would be a very awesome one, and the profanity would be in
old English, but very inspiring. However, the combination of
wide-brimmed hats and crowded cable cars is tremendous in its power to
cause misery to the