d from
immunity for past transgression; the hopes of youth shot with youth's
despairs: not sweet, innocent youth, but youth knowing and experienced,
though not unwilling to shun evil because of the bad morrow it sometimes
brings. No other city under the sun, we doubt, is so expressive of that
youth: that modern youth, able, agile, eager, audacious; not the youth
of the poets, but the youth of the true, the grim realists.

[Illustration: ELECTION-NIGHT CROWDS]

Something, a faint, faint consciousness of this, visits even the sad
heart of age on any New York night when it is not raining too hard, and
one thinks only of getting indoors, where all nights are alike. But
mostly it comes when the autumn is dreaming toward winter in that
interlude of the seasons which we call Indian Summer. It is a stretch of
time which we have handsomely bestowed upon our aborigines, in
compensation for the four seasons we have taken from them, like some of
those Reservations which we have left them in lieu of the immeasurable
lands we have alienated. It used to be longer than it is now; it used to
be several weeks long; in the sense of childhood, it was almost months.
It is still qualitatively the same, and it is more than any other time
expressive of the New York temperament, perhaps because we have honored
in the civic ideal the polity of our Indian predecessors, and in Tammany
and its recurrently triumphant braves, have kept their memory green. But
if this is not so, the spiritual fact remains, and under the sky of the
Election Night you _feel_ New York as you do in no other hour. The sense
extends through the other autumn nights till that night, sure to come,
when the pensive weather breaks in tears, and the next day it rains and
rains, and the streets stream with the flood, and the dull air reeks
with a sort of inner steam, hot, close, and sticky as a brother: a
brother whose wants are many and whose resources are few. The morning
after the storm, there will be a keen thrill in the air, keen but
wholesome and bracing as a good resolution and not necessarily more
lasting. The asphalt has been washed as clean as a renovated conscience,
and the city presses forward again to the future in which alone it has
its being, with the gay confidence of a sinner who has forgiven himself
his sins and is no longer sorry for them.

After that interlude, when the streets of the Advanced Vaudeville, which
we know as New York, begin again and continue ti