esent day the
cars, by force of column and numbers, almost dominate the great street,
and the eye of even an old New Yorker is held by these long yellow
monsters which prowl intently up and down, up and down, in a mystic
search.

In the grey of the morning they come out of the up-town, bearing
janitors, porters, all that class which carries the keys to set alive
the great down-town. Later, they shower clerks. Later still, they shower
more clerks. And the thermometer which is attached to a conductor's
temper is steadily rising, rising, and the blissful time arrives when
everybody hangs to a strap and stands on his neighbour's toes. Ten
o'clock comes, and the Broadway cars, as well as elevated cars, horse
cars, and ferryboats innumerable, heave sighs of relief. They have
filled lower New York with a vast army of men who will chase to and fro
and amuse themselves until almost nightfall.

The cable car's pulse drops to normal. But the conductor's pulse begins
now to beat in split seconds. He has come to the crisis in his day's
agony. He is now to be overwhelmed with feminine shoppers. They all are
going to give him two-dollar bills to change. They all are going to
threaten to report him. He passes his hand across his brow and curses
his beard from black to grey and from grey to black.

Men and women have different ways of hailing a car. A man--if he is not
an old choleric gentleman, who owns not this road but some other
road--throws up a timid finger, and appears to believe that the King of
Abyssinia is careering past on his war-chariot, and only his opinion of
other people's Americanism keeps him from deep salaams. The gripman
usually jerks his thumb over his shoulder and indicates the next car,
which is three miles away. Then the man catches the last platform, goes
into the car, climbs upon some one's toes, opens his morning paper, and
is happy.

When a woman hails a car there is no question of its being the King of
Abyssinia's war-chariot. She has bought the car for three dollars and
ninety-eight cents. The conductor owes his position to her, and the
gripman's mother does her laundry. No captain in the Royal Horse
Artillery ever stops his battery from going through a stone house in a
way to equal her manner of bringing that car back on its haunches. Then
she walks leisurely forward, and after scanning the step to see if there
is any mud upon it, and opening her pocket-book to make sure of a
two-dollar bill, she says