the morning going down town, during the luncheon hour, or
going up town in the evening, one is struck by the enormous number of
women workers who now find employment in this great city--in some
offices hundreds of women, forming almost the entire staff, are
employed. Their competition must make it harder still for the male
clerks. Independent, self-reliant, business-like, a curious type is
being developed of these bread-earners--a type that suggests the
evolution of a neutral sex. Perhaps it is not altogether to be
wondered at, and is only a manifestation of the idea of equality, that
in the down-town cars the man no longer gives up his seat to the woman
who stands holding on to the leather strap over her head in the
crowded car, and does not remove his hat in the elevator when a woman
enters.

Now a black-plumed vehicle comes spinning round the street corner,
followed by three or four carriages with the crape-wearing drivers:
apparently it is only the denseness of the traffic that prevents the
hearse galloping and compels the driver to be content with a quick
trot. Quick lunch, rapid life, fast funeral, devouring cremation, or
else the weary toiler is laid down to have a first try at a real long
sleep in the quivering bosom of the City of Unrest.

XIII

A GLIMPSE OF A SOUTHERN CITY

Every variety of climate, pace, and people is to be found in this
great tract of country which has for its flag the Stars and Stripes,
and any variety of taste ought to be capable of being gratified within
its confines. If I were to come to live on this side of the Atlantic I
think I should elect to settle in a Southern city. New York has many
attractions; it has drawn to it, vortex-like, much of the best that is
bright, able, active, powerful, but, vortex-like, the life swirls,
spinning ceaselessly at a terrific rate, in that noisy city of unrest.
Chicago accentuates the worst features of life in New York while
having few of its compensations, and the large cities in the East and
centre are blends of the life of both diluted with dulness. San
Francisco is a thing apart--the air of the Pacific seems to blow
different impulses on the people, and great and glorious air and
climate and scenery are there, bracing with the breeziness of the
West. Florida and the shores of the Gulf of Mexico are too near the
tropics for my taste, tending towards hammock-basking too much.

Give me a Southern city, say in Georgia; and I have one in m