d Heaven for my safe passage at Forty-second and
Twenty-third streets, and at divers places on Third Avenue. Now I regard
these interlacing iron currents with no more anxiety than I would so
many purling brooks, with stepping-stones in them to keep my feet from
the wet: they are like gentle eddies--soft, clear, slow tides--where one
may pause in the midst at will, compared with the deadly expanses of
Fifth Avenue, with their rush of all manner of vehicles over the smooth
asphalt surface. There I stand long at the brink; I look for a policeman
to guide and guard my steps; I crane my neck forward from my coign of
vantage and count the cabs, the taxicabs, the carriages, the private
automobiles, the motor-buses, the express-wagons, and calculate my
chances. Then I shrink back. If it is a corner where there is no
policeman to bank the tides up on either hand and lead me over, I wait
for some bold, big team to make the transit of the avenue from the
cross-street, and then in its lee I find my way to the other side. As
for the trolleys, I now mock myself of them, as Thackeray's Frenchmen
were said to say in their peculiar English. (I wonder if they really
did?) It is the taxicabs that now turn my heart to water. It is
astonishing how they have multiplied--they have multiplied even beyond
the ratio of our self-reduplicating population. There are so many
already that this morning I read in my paper of a trolley-car striking a
horse-cab! The reporter had written quite unconsciously, just as he used
to write horseless carriage. Yes, the motor-cab is now the type, the
norm, and the horse-cab is the--the--the----"

He hesitated for the antithesis, and we proposed "Abnorm?"

"_Say_ abnorm! It is hideous, but I don't know that it is wrong. Where
was I?"

"You had got quite away from the sublimity of New York, which upon the
whole you seemed to attribute to the tall buildings along Fifth Avenue.
We should like you to explain again why, if 'The Heart of New York,'
with its sky-scrapers, made you think of scrap-iron, the Flatiron
soothed your lacerated sensibilities?"

[Illustration: FIFTH AVENUE FROM THE TOP OF A MOTOR-BUS]

"The Flatiron is an incident, an accent merely, in the mighty music of
the Avenue, a happy discord that makes for harmony. It is no longer
nefarious, or even mischievous, now the reporters have got done
attributing a malign meteorological influence to it. I wish I could say
as much for the white marble rocket p