e and her husband would
probably have been forgotten in a week. As it was, if any man in the
street was seen to be absolutely stationary and absorbed in an evening
paper, an observer would have discovered that the main feature of its
pages was a portrait of Evelyn Nesbit in some new dress or attitude,
with her eyes half raised or drooping, and her hair tied up behind in a
black, semichildish bow. Mr. Jerome, with a good deal of pungent humor,
told me many anecdotes of the trial, and wound up with an allusion to
what he considered the defects of American judges. "In England," he
said, "you make men judges because they understand the law. The trouble
with us is that here, as often as not, a man will be made a judge
because he can play football."

The mention of Stanford White suggests a topic more creditable to
himself than his death, and also possessing a different and wider
interest. Stanford White, whatever may have been his private life, was
the greatest architect in America. Some of the finest buildings in New
York are due to his signal genius, and here I am led on to reflections
of a yet more extensive kind. My own impression was that architecture in
America generally possesses a vitality which to-day is absent from it
in older countries. This observation is pertinent to New York more
especially. New York being built on a narrow island, it has there become
necessary, to a degree hardly to be paralleled elsewhere in the world,
to extend new buildings not laterally, but upward. To this living upward
pressure are due the towering structures vulgarly called "skyscrapers."
These, if properly understood, resemble rather the old campanili of
Italy, and suggest the work of Giotto. They make New York, seen from a
distance, look like a San Gimignano reconstructed by giants. I am,
however, thinking not of the "skyscrapers" only. I am thinking rather of
buildings, lofty indeed, but not tower-like, such as certain clubs,
blocks of residential flats, or business premises in Fifth Avenue--such,
for instance, as those of the great firm of Tiffany. Though metal
frameworks are, no doubt, embedded in these, the stonework is
structurally true to the strains of the metal which it incases, and the
stones of the rusticated bases might have been hewn and put together by
Titans. We have more here than an academic repetition of bygone tastes
and models. We have an expression in stone of the needs of a new world.

One of the most charming ex