enetic substance does not thrill at
the first nightly vision of Broadway, of that fairy flare of electric
lights, advertising whiskeys and actresses and beers, and luring the
beholder into a hundred hotels and theatres and restaurants. It is now
past the hour of roof-gardens with their songs and dances, but the
vaudeville is in full bloom, and the play-houses are blossoming in the
bills of their new comedies and operas and burlesques. The pavements are
filled, but not yet crowded, with people going to dinner at the tables
d'hote; the shop windows glitter and shine, and promise a delight for
the morrow which the morrow may or may not realize.

But as yet the town is not replete to choking, as it will be later, when
those who fancy they constitute the town have got back to it from their
Europes, their Newports, their Bar Harbors, their Lenoxes, their
Tuxedos, weary of scorning delights and living laborious days in that
round of intellectual and moral events duly celebrated in the society
news of the Sunday papers. Fifth Avenue abounds in automobiles but does
not yet super-abound; you do not quite take your life in your hand in
crossing the street at those corners where there is no policeman's hand
to put it in. Everywhere are cars, carts, carriages; and the motorist
whirs through the intersecting streets and round the corners, bent on
suicide or homicide, and the kind old trolleys and hansoms that once
seemed so threatening have almost become so many arks of safety from the
furious machines replacing them. But a few short years ago the passer on
the Avenue could pride himself on a count of twenty automobiles in his
walk from Murray Hill to the Plaza; now he can easily number hundreds,
without an emotion of self-approval.

But their abundance is only provisional, a mere forecast of the
superabundance to come. All things are provisional, all sights, all
sounds, and this forms the peculiar charm of the hour, its haunting and
winning charm. If you take the omnibus-top to be trundled whiningly up
to one of the farther east-side entrances of the Park, and then dismount
and walk back to the Plaza through it, you are even more keenly aware of
the suspensive quality of the time. The summer, which you left for dead
by mountain or sea-shore, stirs with lingering consciousness in the
bland air of the great pleasance. Many leaves are yet green on the
trees, and where they are not green and not there they are gay on the
grass under th