fine avenue on gala afternoons bright with the beauty and
elegance of an opulent city, but I have see no more beautiful faces
than I have seen among these humbler sisters. As the mere habits of
dress in America, except to a very acute critic, give no suggestion of
the rank of the wearer, I can imagine an inexperienced foreigner
utterly mystified and confounded by these girls, who perhaps work a
sewing-machine or walk the long floors of a fashionable dry-goods shop.
I remember one face and figure, faultless and complete,--modestly yet
most becomingly dressed,--indeed, a figure that Compte-Calix might have
taken for one of his exquisite studies, which, between seven and eight
A. M. passed through Eleventh Street, between Sixth Avenue and
Broadway. So exceptionally fine was her carriage, so chaste and
virginal her presence, and so refined and even spiritual her features,
that, as a literary man, I would have been justified in taking her for
the heroine of a society novel. Indeed, I had already woven a little
romance about her, when one morning she overtook me, accompanied by
another girl--pretty, but of a different type--with whom she was
earnestly conversing. As the two passed me, there fell from her
faultless lips the following astounding sentence: "And I told him, if
he didn't like it he might lump it, and he traveled off on his left
ear, you bet!" Heaven knows what indiscretion this speech saved me
from; but the reader will understand what a sting the pain of rejection
might have added to it by the above formula.

The "morning-cocktail" men come next in my experience of early rising.
I used to take my early cup of coffee in the cafe of a certain
fashionable restaurant that had a bar attached. I could not help
noticing that, unlike the usual social libations of my countrymen, the
act of taking a morning cocktail was a solitary one. In the course of
my experience I cannot recall the fact of two men taking an
ante-breakfast cocktail together. On the contrary, I have observed the
male animal rush savagely at the bar, demand his drink of the
bar-keeper, swallow it, and hasten from the scene of his early
debauchery, or else take it in a languid, perfunctory manner, which, I
think, must have been insulting to the bar-keeper. I have observed two
men, whom I had seen drinking amicably together the preceding night,
standing gloomily at the opposite corners of the bar, evidently trying
not to see each other and making th