t city.

[Illustration: BROADWAY ON ELECTION NIGHT]

The rest of the ride was an enfevered phantasmagoria. We burst
startlingly into a very remarkable deep glade--on the floor of it long
and violent surface-cars, a few open shops and bars with commissionaires
at the doors, vehicles dipping and rising out of holes in the ground,
vistas of forests of iron pillars, on the top of which ran deafening,
glittering trains, as on a tight-rope; above all that, a layer of
darkness; and above the layer of darkness enormous moving images of
things in electricity--a mastodon kitten playing with a ball of thread,
an umbrella in a shower of rain, siphons of soda-water being emptied
and filled, gigantic horses galloping at full speed, and an incredible
heraldry of chewing-gum.... Sky-signs! In Europe I had always inveighed
manfully against sky-signs. But now I bowed the head, vanquished. These
sky-signs annihilated argument. Moreover, had they not been made
possible by the invention of a European, and that European an intimate
friend of my own?...

"I suppose this is Broadway?" I ventured.

It was. That is to say, it was one of the Broadways. There are several
different ones. What could be more different from this than the
down-town Broadway of Trinity Church and the crowded sky-scrapers? And
even this Broadway could differ from itself, as I knew later on an
election night.... I was overpowered by Broadway.

"You must not expect me to talk," I said.

We drew up in front of a huge hotel and went into the bar, huge and
gorgeous to match, shimmering with white bartenders and a variegated
population of men-about-town. I had never seen such a bar.

"Two Polands and a Scotch highball," was the order. Of which
geographical language I understood not a word.

"See the fresco," my particular friend suggested. And from his tone, at
once modestly content and artificially careless, I knew that that
nursery-rhyme fresco was one of the sights of the pleasure quarter of
New York, and that I ought to admire it. Well, I did admire it. I found
it rather fine and apposite. But the free-luncheon counter, as a sight,
took my fancy more. Here it was, the free-luncheon counter of which the
European reads--generously loaded, and much freer than the air.

"Have something?"

I would not. They could shame me into drinking coffee, but they could
not shame me into eating corned beef and granite biscuits at eleven
o'clock at night. The Poland water suffic