in with the sight of the vote from the first precinct.
Meantime policemen, nervously fondling their clubs in their hands, hang
upon the fringes of the crowd, which is yet so good-natured that it
seems to have no impulse but to lift children on its shoulders and put
pretty girls before it, and caress old women and cripples into favorable
positions, so that they may see better. You will wish to leave it before
the clubbing begins, and either go home to the slumbers which the
whistling and twanging will duly attend; or join the diners going into
or coming out of the restaurants, or the throngs strolling down into the
fairy realms of Broadway, under the flare of the whiskeys and the
actresses.

At such a time it is best to be young, but it is not so very bad to be
old, for the charm of the hour, the air, and the place is such that even
the heart of age must rise a little at it. What the night may really be,
if it is not positively raining, you "do not know or need to know."
Those soft lamps overhead, which might alike seem let garlanding down
from the vault above or flowering up from the gulfs below out of a still
greater pyrotechnic richness, supply the defect, if there is any, of
moon and stars. Only the air is actual, the air of the New York night,
which is as different from that of the London night as from that of the
Paris night, or, for all we know, the St. Petersburg night. At times we
have fancied in its early autumnal tones something Florentine, something
Venetian, but, after all, it is not quite either, even when the tones of
these are crudest. It is the subtlest, the most penetrating expression
of the New York temperament; but what that is, who shall say? That
mystic air is haunted little from the past, for properly speaking there
never was a city so unhistorical in temperament. A record of civic
corruption, running back to the first servants of the Dutch Companies,
does not constitute municipal history, and our part in national events
from the time we felt the stirrings of national consciousness has not
been glorious, as these have not been impressive. Of New York's present
at any given moment you wish to say in her patient-impatient slang,
"Forget it, forget it." There remains only the future from which she can
derive that temperamental effect in her night air; but, again, what
that is, who shall say? If any one were so daring, he might say it was
confidence modified by anxiety; a rash expectation of luck derive