that would set off or even harmonize with this sickly hue. To do the New Yorker justice no ordinary canons of art deter him from experiments. The brown stone fronts are backed with brick painted a brilliant red, pointed in black. Add to this Venetian shutters of a bright green, and sunblinds of crimson stripes, and you will get a result joyously achieved in many of the streets of New York. Sometimes whilst the shutters remain a brilliant green there are calico blinds of a deep blue. But I am not sure that this is an improvement.

In Fifth Avenue and streets akin to it, there is some general toning down of these colours. But they break out here and there, and scarcely anywhere is the eye relieved from the depression of the deadly dulness of the brown. In New York politics efforts are sometimes made to bring about what are called the primary elections in July, because in that month, as it is said, "the brown stone fronts are out of town." If this were literally true it would be a great deliverance for New York.

But the wind is tempered to the shorn lamb, and New York has an architectural glory, perhaps two, which cover a multitude of brown stone fronts. The lesser one is the white marble cathedral in Fifth Avenue, the

VOL. I.

3

finest modern building of the kind I ever saw. The other, a marvel of combined beauty and strength, is Brooklyn Bridge, which is worth a journey across the Atlantic to see. Looked at from a distance, whether near or far, it seems to span the broad river with gossamer web. Yet an army might march across it, or the population of a small town might live upon it without fear of the yawning gulf below.

CHAPTER III.

SOME WESTERN TOWNS.

"WHEN I said I would die a bachelor I never thought I would live to be married," says Benedick, when reminded of earlier perversity. When with equal confidence I wrote of New York as the most unpaved of civilized cities, I had not been to Chicago. In this respect the metropolis of the West certainly beats the chief town of the Republic. Here and there New York can show a street or portion of a street as bad as anything in Chicago. There is, for example, a thoroughfare leading out of Broadway in the direction of Nassau Street which will maintain the reputation of New York against the world. I forget the name of this Slough of Despond, but it is in the very centre of the busiest parts of the city, answering pretty much to our Old Jewry. Thousands of busy feet thread it in the course

of a day, and cabs lumber through it, jolting and splashing around the plentiful mud. In the country districts, where the roads are occasionally bad, though infinitely better than in the centre of civilization, they have a pretty expressive name for sudden abysses or unexpected upheavals. "Thank-'ee-marms," they call them, because people in cab or car passing over them involuntarily make obeisance as if acknowledging the receipt of a favour. New Yorkers do not hesitate to attribute the prevalence of "Thank-'ee-marms' in their principal roadways to corruption in municipal affairs. They pay rates for road-making and road-mending, they say, but the money melts away before it reaches the streets.

In Chicago the mayor is personally saddled with the responsibility of the shameful condition of the city, both in respect of its wrecked roadways and its general aspect of dirt. Every morning the local newspapers, with the iteration that seems to pass through parts of America as currency for humour, ask when the mayor will have the city cleaned. I believe that disregard of this commonest public convenience is innate in the American character. They are still a young people, pioneers in a new country, where the first thing a settler did was to clear a space, run up a shanty, and

let the road grow of itself. In towns farther West, like St. Louis and Kansas City, the principle can be more clearly seen in practice. Kansas City in particular, a rapidly growing town, apparently builds houses in such haste that it forgets the customary appanage of streets by which they may be approached.

In Chicago this peculiarity is the more striking by comparison with the palatial houses and shops that line the ditches along which the vehicles flounder, and through which men and women pick their perilous way. It is amongst the proudest records of Chicago that it was bodily raised several feet from a swamp. With the customary national neglect of the roads, these were not lifted to the full height of the general level. The consequence is that, except at crossings, where there is a kind of planking, it is necessary to take a leap off the pavement into the road. This is awkward for the pedestrian, but the advertiser sees his opportunity, and all along the edge of the pavement advertisements are pasted, and are very conveniently seen from the roadway.

Talking about advertisements, and the ingenious methods created for their display, I think the palm must be worn by the agent of a tobacco manufactory whom I saw at work in