ir feelings and restore the circulation. The very tramp who
hangs by his arms on the window-bars of the power-house at Houston
Street and Broadway indulges in safe repartee with the engineer down
in the depths, and chuckles at being more than a match for him. Down
there it is always July, rage the storm king ever so boisterously up
on the level. The windows on the Mercer Street corner of the building
are always open--or else there are no windows. The spaces between the
bars admit a man's arm very handily, and as a result there are always
on cold nights as many hands pointing downward at the engineer and his
boilers as there are openings in the iron fence. The tramps sleep, so
suspended the night long, toasting themselves alternately on front and
back.

The good humor under untoward circumstances that is one of the traits
of our people never comes out so strongly as when winter blocks river
and harbor with ice and causes no end of trouble and inconvenience to
the vast army of workers which daily invades New York in the morning
and departs again with the gathering twilight. The five-minute trip
across sometimes takes hours then, and there is never any telling
where one is likely to land, once the boat is in the stream. I have,
on one occasion, spent nearly six hours on an East River ferry-boat,
trying to cross to Fulton Street in Brooklyn, during which time we
circumnavigated Governor's Island and made an involuntary excursion
down the bay. It was during the Beecher trial, and we had a number of
the lawyers on both sides on board, so that the court had to adjourn
that day while we tried the case among the ice-floes. But though the
loss of time was very great, yet I saw no sign of annoyance among the
passengers through all that trip. Everybody made the best of a bad
bargain.

Many a time since, have I stood jammed in a hungry and tired crowd on
the Thirty-fourth Street ferry for an hour at a time, watching the
vain efforts of the pilot to make a landing, while train after train
went out with no passengers, and have listened to the laughter and
groans that heralded each failure. Then, when at last the boat
touched the end of the slip and one man after another climbed upon the
swaying piles and groped his perilous way toward the shore, the cheers
that arose and followed them on their way, with everybody offering
advice and encouragement, and accepting it in the same good-humored
way!

In the two big snow-storms of a rece