resently soaring up from the east
side of Madison Square, and sinking the beautiful reproduction of the
Giralda tower in the Garden half-way into the ground. As I look at this
pale yellowish brown imitation of the Seville original, it has a pathos
which I might not make you feel. But I would rather not look away from
Fifth Avenue at all. It is astonishing how that street has assumed and
resumed all the larger and denser life of the other streets. Certain of
the avenues, like Third and Sixth, remain immutably and
characteristically noisy and ignoble; and Fifth Avenue has not
reduced them to insignificance as it has Broadway. That is now a
provincial High Street beside its lordlier compeer; but I remember when
Broadway stormed and swarmed with busy life. Why, I remember the
party-colored 'buses which used to thunder up and down; and I can fancy
some Rip Van Winkle of the interior returning to the remembered terrors
and splendors of that mighty thoroughfare, and expecting to be killed at
every crossing--I can fancy such a visitor looking round in wonder at
the difference and asking the last decaying survivor of the famous
Broadway Squad what they had done with Broadway from the Battery to
Madison Square. Beyond that, to be sure, there is a mighty flare of
electrics blazoning the virtues of the popular beers, whiskeys, and
actresses, which might well mislead my elderly revisitor with the belief
that Broadway was only taken in by day, and was set out again after dark
in its pristine--I think pristine is the word; it used to be--glory. But
even by night that special length of Broadway lacks the sublimity of
Fifth Avenue, as I see it or imagine it from my motor-bus top. _I_ knew
Fifth Avenue in the Lincolnian period of brick and brownstone, when it
had a quiet, exclusive beauty, the beauty of the unbroken sky-line and
the regularity of facade which it has not yet got back, and may never
get. You will get some notion of it still in Madison Avenue, say from
Twenty-eighth to Forty-second streets, and perhaps you will think it was
dull as well as proud. It is proud now, but it is certainly not dull.
There is something of columnar majesty in the lofty flanks of these tall
shops and hotels as you approach them, which makes you think of some
capital decked for a national holiday. But in Fifth Avenue it is always
holiday--"

"Enough of streets!" we cried, impatiently. "Now, what of men? What of
that heterogeneity for which New York is