ll the Chasers come in
late May, there will be many other sorts of weather, but none so
characteristic of her. There will be the sort of weather toward the end
of January, when really it seems as if nothing else could console him
for the intolerable freezing and thawing, the snow upon snow, the rain
upon rain, the winds that soak him and the winds that shrivel him, and
the suns that mock him from a subtropic sky through subarctic air. We
foresee him then settling into his arm-chair, while the wind whistles as
naturally as the wind in the theatre around the angles of his lofty
flat, and drives the snow of the shredded paper through the air or beats
it in soft clots against the pane. He turns our page, and as he catches
our vague drift, before yielding himself wholly to its allure, he
questions, as readers like to do, whether the writer is altogether right
in his contention that the mid-autumnal moment is the most
characteristic moment of the New York year. Is not the mid-winter moment
yet more characteristic? He conjures up, in the rich content of his
indoor remoteness, the vision of the vile street below his flat, banked
high with the garnered heaps of filthy snow, which alternately freeze
and thaw, which the rain does not wash nor the wind blow away, and which
the shredded-paper flakes are now drifting higher. He sees the
foot-passers struggling under their umbrellas toward the avenues where
the reluctant trolleys pause jarringly for them, and the elevated trains
roar along the trestle overhead; where the saloon winks a wicked eye on
every corner; where the signs of the whiskeys and actresses flare
through the thickened night; and the cab tilts and rocks across the
trolley rails, and the crowds of hotel-sojourners seek the shelter of
the theatres, and all is bleak and wet and squalid. In more respectful
vision he beholds the darkened mansions of the richest and best, who
have already fled the scene of their brief winter revel and are forcing
the spring in their Floridas, their Egypts, their Rivieras. He himself
remains midway between the last fall and the next spring; and perhaps he
decides against the writer, as the perverse reader sometimes will, and
holds that this hour of suspense and misgiving is the supreme, the
duodecimal hour of the metropolitan dial. He may be right; who knows?
New York's hours are all characteristic; and the hour whose mystical
quality we have been trying to intimate is already past, and we mus