king end of the sweeper
looks like nothing so much as the captain on the bridge of a
man-of-war, and he conducts himself with the same imperturbable calm
under the petty assaults of the guerillas of the street.

From the moment a storm breaks till the last flake has fallen, the
sweepers are run unceasingly over the tracks of the railroads, each in
its own division, which it is its business to keep clear. The track is
all the companies have to mind. There was a law, or a rule, or an
understanding, nobody seems to know exactly which, that they were to
sweep also between the tracks, and two feet on each side, in return
for their franchises; but in effect this proved impracticable. It was
never done. Under the late Colonel Waring the Street-Cleaning
Department came to an understanding with the railroad companies under
which they clear certain streets, not on their routes, that are
computed to have a surface space equal to that which they would have
had to clean had they lived up to the old rule. The department in its
turn removes the accumulations piled up by their sweepers, unless a
providential thaw gets ahead of it.

Removing the snow after a big storm from the streets of New York, or
even from an appreciable number of them, is a task beside which the
cleaning of the Augean stables was a mean and petty affair. In dealing
with the dirt, Hercules's expedient has sometimes been attempted, with
more or less success; but not even turning the East River into our
streets would rid them of the snow. Though in the last severe winter
the department employed at times as many as four thousand extra men
and all the carts that were to be drummed up in the city, carting
away, as I have said, the enormous total of more than a million and a
half cubic yards of snow, every citizen knows, and testified loudly at
the time, that it all hardly scratched the ground. The problem is one
of the many great ones of modern city life which our age of invention
must bequeath unsolved to the dawning century.

In the Street-Cleaning Department's service the snow-plough holds yet
its ancient place of usefulness. Eleven of them are kept for use in
Manhattan and the Bronx alone. The service to which they are put is to
clear at the shortest notice, not the travelled avenues where the
railroad sweepers run, but the side streets that lead from these to
the fire-engine and truck-houses, to break a way for the apparatus for
the emergency that is sure to come