nt winter, when traffic was for a
season interrupted, and in the great blizzard of 1888, when it was
completely suspended, even on the elevated road, and news reached us
from Boston only by cable via London, it was laughing and snowballing
crowds one encountered plodding through the drifts. It was as if real
relief had come with the lifting of the strain of our modern life and
the momentary relapse into the slow-going way of our fathers. Out in
Queens, where we were snow-bound for days, we went about digging one
another out and behaving like a lot of boys, once we had made sure
that the office would have to mind itself for a season.

It is, however, not to the outlying boroughs one has to go if he
wishes to catch the real human spirit that is abroad in the city in a
snow-storm, or to the avenues where the rich live, though the snow to
them might well be a real luxury; or even to the rivers, attractive
as they are in the wild grandeur of arctic festooning from mastheads
and rigging; with incoming steamers, armored in shining white, picking
their way as circumspectly among the floes as if they were navigating
Baffin's Bay instead of the Hudson River; and with their swarms of
swift sea-gulls, some of them spotless white, others as rusty and
dusty as the scavengers whom for the time being they replace
ineffectually, all of them greedily intent upon wresting from the
stream the food which they no longer find outside the Hook. I should
like you well enough to linger with me on the river till the storm is
over, and watch the marvellous sunsets that flood the western sky with
colors of green and gold which no painter's brush ever matched; and
when night has dropped the curtain, to see the lights flashing forth
from the tall buildings in story after story until it is as if the
fairyland of our childhood's dreams lay there upon the brooding waters
within grasp of mortal hands.

Beautiful as these are, it is to none of them I should take you,
nevertheless, to show you the spirit of winter in New York. Not to
"the road," where the traditional strife for the magnum of champagne
is waged still; or to that other road farther east upon which the
young--and the old, too, for that matter--take straw-rides to City
Island, there to eat clam chowder, the like of which is not to be
found, it is said, in or out of Manhattan. I should lead you, instead,
down among the tenements, where, mayhap, you thought to find only
misery and gloom, and b