ed me.

We swept perilously off again into the welter. That same evening three
of my steamer companions were thrown out of a rickety taxi into a hole
in the ground in the middle of New York, with the result that one of
them spent a week in a hotel bed, under doctor and nurse. But I went
scatheless. Such are the hazards of life.... We arrived at a terminus.
And it was a great terminus. A great terminus is an inhospitable place.
And just here, in the perfection of the manner in which my minutest
comfort was studied and provided for, I began to appreciate the
significance of American hospitality--that combination of eager
good-nature, Oriental lavishness, and sheer brains. We had time to
spare. Close to the terminus we had passed by a hotel whose summit, for
all my straining out of the window of the cab, I had been unable to
descry. I said that I should really like to see the top of that hotel.
No sooner said than done. I saw the highest hotel I had ever seen. We
went into the hotel, teeming like the other one, and from an agreeable
and lively young dandy bought three cigars out of millions of cigars.
Naught but bank-notes seemed to be current. The European has an awe of
bank-notes, whatever their value.

Then we were in the train, and the train was moving. And every few
seconds it shot past the end of a long, straight, lighted
thoroughfare--scores upon scores of them, with a wider and more
brilliant street interspersed among them at intervals. And I forgot at
what hundredth street the train paused before rolling finally out of New
York. I had had the feeling of a vast and metropolitan city. I thought,
"Whatever this is or is not, it is a metropolis, and will rank with the
best of 'em." I had lived long in more than one metropolis, and I knew
the proud and the shameful unmistakable marks of the real thing. And I
was aware of a poignant sympathy with those people and those mysterious
generations who had been gradually and yet so rapidly putting together,
girder by girder and tradition by tradition, all unseen by me till then,
this illustrious, proud organism, with its nobility and its baseness,
its rectitude and its mournful errors, its colossal sense of life. I
liked New York irrevocably.

II

STREETS

When I first looked at Fifth Avenue by sunlight, in the tranquillity of
Sunday morning, and when I last set eyes on it, in the ordinary peevish
gloom of a busy sailing-day, I thought it was the proudest thoroug