way men--all of them had an air of passionate aliveness, an
intellectual avidity that made contact with them an affair of
delightful excitement.

CHAPTER XXIV

NEW YORK

There was no qualification or reservation in New York's welcome to the
Prince of Wales.

In the last year or so I have seen some great crowds, and by that I
mean not merely vast aggregations of people, but vast gatherings of
people whose ardour carried away the emotions with a tremendous psychic
force. During that year I had seen the London crowd that welcomed back
the British military leader; the London and Manchester crowds, and
vivid and stirring crowds they were, that dogged the footsteps of
President Wilson; I had seen the marvellous and poignant crowd at the
London Victory March, and I had had a course of crowds, vigorous,
affectionate and lively, in Montreal, Toronto and throughout Canada.

I had been toughened to crowds, yet the New York crowd that welcomed
the Prince was a fresh experience. It was a crowd that, in spite of
writing continuously about crowds for four months, gave me a direct
impulse to write yet again about a crowd, that gave me the feeling that
here was something fresh, sparkling, human, warm, ardent and
provocative. It was a crowd with a flutter of laughter in it, a crowd
that had a personality, an _insouciance_, an independence in its
friendliness. It was a crowd that I shall always put beside other
mental pictures of big crowds, in that gallery of clear vignettes of
things impressive that make the memory.

There was a big crowd about the Battery long before the Prince was due
to arrive across the river from the Jersey City side. It was a
good-humoured crowd that helped the capable New York policemen to keep
itself well in hand. It was not only thick about the open grass space
of the Battery, but it was clustering on the skeleton structure of the
Elevated Railway, and mounting to the sky, floor by floor, on the
skyscrapers.

High up on the twenty-second floor of neighbouring buildings we could
see a crowd of dolls and windows, and the dolls were waving shreds of
cotton. The dolls were women and the cotton shred was "Old Glory."
High up on the tremendous cornice of one building a tiny man stood with
all the calm gravity of a statue. He was unconcerned by the height, he
was only concerned in obtaining an eagle's eye view.

About the landing-stage itself, the landing-stage where the new
Americans and the