ess,
too, for shops, and there were miles of them; stores they call them, and
every mortal thing is stored behind their immense panes of plate-glass,
or in those outposts of business, the show-cases, that go dodging about
the footpath, and look as if they were on their way to some
international exhibition. Anything and everything man can desire to
smooth the thorny path from the cradle to cremation, he will find in the
Broadway.

Talking of the thorny path, I was much struck by the liberty, not to say
licence, accorded to the paving stones, each of which acted quite
independently of his neighbour. The noise, as the vehicles ploughed
their way along the road, and as it was echoed by the massive stone
buildings, was really appalling. Infernal, I should say, but that
adjective is too good in this case, for the Inferno was at least paved
with good intentions, whereas that road meant mischief and strife, and
revelled in the purity of its own cussedness.

I could not help speculating as to what dear old mother Regent Street
would think of it all; how she would be shocked at the way in which that
transatlantic upstart hands up his goods from the basement, and pushes
them just under your nose, or piles them up sky-high and block deep,
before he consents to put a roof on them. Father Oxford Street, too,
would be scandalised, and so would his time-honoured brother-streets,
that fancy themselves arteries, as they wind their crooked way from the
fashionable brick piles of the west to the golden-calf temples of the
east. They do their best, suffering as they are from chronic congestion,
and I have loved them since the days of my boyhood. No, I certainly mean
no disrespect to the British lion and his partner the unicorn, nor to
the griffin at Temple Bar, nor to the bulls and bears farther on, nor to
the turtles and plovers' eggs at the Mansion House; least of all to the
bank-notes opposite, good company as they always are.

America is a country of contradictions; that is a safe way of putting
it, as the same can be said of all countries. Wherever he goes, the
stranger sees with his own eyes, feels with his own heart, and above
all, judges according to the state of his own liver. One man practises
his bump of veneration on all he meets; another travels on the _nil
admirari_ principle. Golden threads traverse the road of either, and so
do rotten threads. The first man seizes the golden ones and is happy;
the second picks up the rott