THE walk up-town reaches from the bottom of the buzzing region where money is made to the bright zone where it is spent and displayed; and the walk is a delight all the way. It is full of variety, color, charm, exhilaration—almost intoxication, on its best days.

Indeed, there are connoisseurs in cities who say that of all walks of this sort in the world New York's is the best. The walk in London from the city to the West End by way of Fleet Street, the Strand, and Piccadilly, is teeming with interest to the tourist—Temple Bar, St. Clement's, Trafalgar Square and all—but, for a walk up-town, a walk home to be taken daily, it is apt to be oppressive and saddening, even without the fog; so say many of those who know it best. Paris, with her boulevards, undoubtedly has unapproachable opportunities for the flaneur, but like Rome and Vienna and most of the other European capitals, she has no one main artery for a homeward stream of working humanity at close of day; and that is what "the walk up-town" means.

And yet so few, comparatively, of those whose physique and office hours permit, take this appetizing, worry-dispelling walk of ours; this is made obvious every afternoon, from three o'clock on, by the surface and elevated cars, into which the bulk of scowling New York seems to prefer to push itself, after a day spent mostly indoors; here to get bumped and ill-tempered, snatching an occasional glimpse of the afternoon paper held in the hand which does not clutch the strap overhead. It seems a great pity. The walk is just the right length to take before dressing for dinner. A line drawn eastward from the park plaza at Fifty-eighth Street will almost strike an old mile-stone still standing in Third Avenue, which says, "4 miles from City Hall, New York." The City Hall was in Wall Street when those old-fashioned letters were cut, and Third Avenue was the Post Road.

Many good New Yorkers (chiefly, however, of that small per cent. born in New York, who generally know rather little about their town except that they love it) have not been so remotely far down the island as Battery Park for a decade, unless to engage passage at the steamship offices which until recently were to be found in the sturdy houses of the good old Row (though once called "Mushroom Row") opposite the oval of the ancient Bowling Green, where now the oddly placed statue of Abram de Peyster sits and stares all day. (Now that these old gable windows and broad chimneys are gone I wonder how he will like the new Custom-house.)

Now, the grandmothers of these same New Yorkers, long ago, before there were any steamships, when Castle Garden was a separate island and Battery Park was a fashionable esplanade from which to watch the shipping in the bay and the sunsets over the Jersey hills—their grandmothers, dressed in tight pelisses and carrying reticules, were wont to take a brisk walk, in their very low-cut shoes, along the sea-wall before breakfast and breathe the early morning air. They did not have so far to go in those days, and it was a fashionable thing to do. To-day you can see almost every variety of humanity on the cement paths from Pier A to Castle Garden, except that known as fashionable. But the sunsets are just as good and the lights on the gentle hills of Staten Island quite as soft and there are more varieties of water-craft to gaze at in the bristling bay. I should think more people would come to look at it all.

I mean of those even who do not like to mingle with other species than their own and yet want fresh air and exercise. On a Sunday in winter if they were to come down here for their afternoon stroll they would find (after a pleasant trip on nearly empty elevated cars) less "objectionable" people and fewer of them than on the crowded up-town walks.

What there are of strollers down here—in winter—are representatives of the various sets of eminently respectable janitors' families (of which there are almost as many grades as there are heights of the roofs from which they have descended), and modest young jackies, with flapping trousers, and open-mouthed emigrants, though more of the latter are to be seen on those flimsy, one-horsed express wagons coming from the Barge Office, seated on piles of dirty baggage—with steerage tags still fresh—whole families of them, bright-colored head-gear and squalling children, bound for the foreign-named emigrant hotels and homes which are as interesting as the immigrants. Some of these latter are right opposite there on State Street, including one with "pillared balcony rising from the second floor to the roof," which is said to be the earlier home of Jacob Dolph in Bunner's novel—a better fate surely than that of the other New York house for which the book was named.

Across the park and up and around West Street are more of these immigrant places, some with foreign lettering and some plain Raines's law hotels with mirrored bars. One of them, perhaps the smallest and lowest-ceiled of all, is where Stevenson slept, or tried to, in his amateur emigranting.

These are among the few older houses in New York used for the same purposes as from the beginning. They seem to have been left stranded down around this earliest part of the town by an eddy in the commercial current which sweeps nearly everything else to the northward from its original moorings.... But this is not what is commonly meant by "down-town," though it is the farthest down you can go, nor is it where the walk up-town properly begins.

The Walk Up-town begins where the real Broadway begins, somewhat above the bend, past the foreign consulates, away from the old houses and the early nineteenth century atmosphere. Crowded sidewalks, a continuous roar, intent passers-by, jammed streets, clanging cable-cars with down-towners dodging them automatically; the region of the modern high business building.

Above are stories uncountable (unless you are willing to be bumped into); beside you, hurried-looking people gazing straight ahead or dashing in and out of these large doors which are kept swinging back and forth all day; very heavy doors to push, especially in winter, when there are sometimes three sets of them. Within is the vestibule bulletin-board with hundreds of men's names and office-numbers on it; near by stands a judicial-looking person in uniform who knows them all, and starts the various elevators by exclaiming "Up!" in a resonant voice. While outside the crowd still hums and hurries on; it never gets tired; it seems to pay no attention to anything. It is a matter of wonder how a living is made by all the newsstands on the corners; all the dealers in pencils and pipe-cleaners and shoe-strings and rubber faces who are thick between the corners, to whom as little heed is given as to the clatter of trucks or the wrangling of the now-blocked cable-cars, or the cursing truck-drivers, or the echoing hammering of the iron-workers on the huge girders of that new office building across the way.

But that is simply because the crowd is accustomed to all these common phenomena of the city street. As a matter of fact, half of them are not so terrifically busy and important as they consider themselves. They seem to be in a great hurry, but they do not move very fast, as all know who try to take the walk up-town at a brisk pace, and most of them wear that intent, troubled expression of countenance simply from imitation or a habit generated by the spirit of the place. But it gives a quaking sensation to the poor young man from the country who has been walking the streets for weeks looking for a job; and it makes the visiting foreigner take out his note-book and write a stereotyped phrase or two about Americans—next to his note about our "Quick Lunch" signs which never fail to astonish him, and behind which may be seen lunchers lingering for the space of two cigars.

An ambulance, with its nervous, arrogant bell, comes scudding down the street. A very important young interne is on the rear keeping his balance with arrogant ease. His youthful, spectacled face is set in stony indifference to all possible human suffering. The police clear the way for him. And now see your rushing "busy throng" forget itself and stop rushing. It blocks the sidewalk in five seconds, and still stays there, growing larger, after those walking up-town have passed on. The beautiful spire of Trinity, with its soft, brown stone and the green trees and quaintly lettered historic tombs beneath and the damp monument to Revolutionary martyrs over in one corner—no longer looks down benignly on all about it, because, for the most part, it has to look up. On all sides men have reared their marts of commerce higher than the house of God.

It seems perfectly proper that they should, for they must build in some direction and see what valuable real estate they have given up to those dead people who cannot even appreciate it. Here among the quiet graves the thoughtful stranger is accustomed to moralize tritely on how thoughtless of death and eternity is "the hurrying throng" just outside the iron fence, who, by the way, have to pass that church every day, in many cases three or four times, and so can't very well keep on being impressed by the nearness of death, etc., about which, perhaps, it is just as well not to worry during the hours God meant for work. Even though one cannot get much of a view from the steeple, except down Wall Street, which looks harmless and disappointingly narrow and quiet at first sight, Trinity is still one of the show-places of New York, and it makes a pleasing and restful landmark in the walk up Broadway. It deserves to be starred in Baedeker.

Now comes the most rushing section of all down-town: from Trinity to St. Paul's, clattering, crowded, typical Down-Town. So much in a hurry is it that at Cedar Street it skips in twenty or thirty feet a whole section of numbers from 119 to 135. The east side of the street is not so capricious; it skips merely from No. 120 to 128.

The people that cover the sidewalks up and down this section, occasionally overflowing into the streets, would probably be pronounced a typical New York crowd, although half of them never spend an entire day in New York City from one end of the month to the other, and half of that half sleep and eat two of their meals in another State of the Union. The proportion might seem even greater than that, perhaps it is, if at the usual hour the up-town walker should be obliged to struggle up Cortlandt Street or any of the ferry streets down which the torrents of commuters pour.

Up near St. Paul's the sky-scrapers again become thick, so that the occasional old-fashioned five or six story buildings of solid walls with steep steps leading up to the door, seem like playthings beside which the modern building shoots up—on up, as if just beginning where the old ones left off. More like towers are many of these new edifices, or magnified obelisks, as seen from the ferries, the windows and lettering for hieroglyphics. Others are shaped like plain goods-boxes on end, or suggest, the ornate ones, pieces of carefully cut cake standing alone and ready to fall over at any moment and damage the icing.

Good old St. Paul's, which is really old and, to some of us, more lovable than ornate, Anglican Trinity, has also been made to look insignificant in size by its overpowering commercial neighbors, especially as seen from the Sixth Avenue Elevated cars against the new, ridiculous high building on Park Row. But St. Paul's turns its plain, broad, Colonial back upon busy Broadway and does not seem to care so much as Trinity. The church-yard is not so old nor so large as Trinity's, but somehow it always seems to me more rural and church-yardish and feels as sunny and sequestered as though miles instead of a few feet from Broadway and business.

Now, off to the right oblique from St. Paul's, marches Park Row with its very mixed crowd, which overflows the sidewalks, not only now at going-home time, but at all hours of the day and most of the night; and on up, under the bridge conduit, black just now with home-hurrying Brooklynites and Long Islanders, we know we could soon come to the Bowery and all that the Bowery means, and that, of course, is a walk worth taking. But The Walk Up-town, as such, lies straight up Broadway, between the substantial old Astor House, the last large hotel remaining down-town, and the huge, obtrusive post-office building, as hideous as a badly tied bundle, but which leads us on because we know—or, if strangers, because we do not know—that when once we get beyond it we shall see the calm, unstrenuous beauty of the City Hall with its grateful lack of height, in its restful bit of park. Here, under the first trees, is the unconventional statue of Nathan Hale, and there, under those other trees—up near the court-house, I suppose—is where certain memorable boy stories used to begin, with a poor, pathetic newsboy who did noble deeds and in the last chapter always married the daughter of his former employer, now his partner. By this time some of the regular walkers up-town have settled down to a steady pace; others are just falling in at this point—just falling in here where once (not so very many years ago) the city fathers thought that few would pass but farmers on the way to market, and so put cheap red sandstone in the back of the City Hall.

Over there, on the west side of the street, still stands a complete row of early buildings—one of the very few remaining along Broadway—with gable windows and wide chimneys. Lawyers' offices and insurance signs are very prominent for a time. Then comes a block or two chiefly of sporting-goods stores with windows crowded full of hammerless guns, smokeless cartridges, portable canoes, and other delights which from morning to night draw sighs out of little boys who press their faces against the glass awhile and then run on. Next is a thin stratum composed chiefly of ticket-scalpers, then suddenly you find yourself in the heart of the wholesale district, with millions of brazen signs, one over another, with names "like a list of Rhine wines;" block after block of it, a long, unbroken stretch.

II

This comes nearer to being monotonous than any part of the walk. But even here, to lure the walker on, far ahead, almost exactly in the centre of the caÑon of commercial Broadway, can be seen the pure white spire of Grace Church, planted there at the bend of the thoroughfare, as if purposely to stand out like a beacon and signal to those below that Broadway changes at last and that up there are some Christians.

But there are always plenty of people to look at, nor are they all black-mustached, black-cigared merchants talking dollars; at six o'clock women and girls pour down the stairs and elevators, and out upon the street with a look of relief; stenographers, cloak inspectors, forewomen, and little girls of all ages. Then you hear "Good-night, Mame." "Good-night, Rachel." "What's your hurry? Got a date?" And off they go, mostly to the eastward, looking exceedingly happy and not invariably overworked.

Others are emissaries from the sweat-shops, men with long beards and large bundles and very sober eyes, patriarchal-looking sometimes when the beard is white, who go upstairs with their loads and come down again and trudge off down the side-street once more to go on where they left off, by gas-light now.

And all this was once the great Broadway where not many years ago the promenaders strutted up and down in the afternoon, women in low neck and India shawls; dandies, as they were then called, in tremendous trousers with huge checks. Occasionally even now you see a few strollers here by mistake, elderly people from a distance revisiting New York after many years and bringing their families with them. "Now, children, you are on Broadway!" the fatherly smile seems to say. "Look at everything." They probably stop at the Astor House.

As the wholesale dry-goods district is left behind and the realm of the jobbers in "notions" is reached, and the handlers of artificial flowers and patent buttons and all sorts of specialties, Grace Church spire becomes nearer and clearer, so that the base of it can be seen. Here, as below, and farther below and above and everywhere along Broadway, are the stoop and sidewalk sellers of candies, dogs, combs, chewing-gum, pipes, looking-glasses, and horrible burning smells. They seem especially to love the neighborhood of what all walkers up-town detest, a new building in the course of erection—with sidewalks blocked, and a set of steep steps to mount—only, your true walker up-town always prefers to go around by way of the street, where he is almost run down by a cab, perhaps, which he forgets entirely a moment later when he suddenly hears a stirring bell, an approaching roar, and a shrieking whistle growing louder:

Across Broadway flashes a fire-engine, with the horses at a gallop, the earth trembling, the hatless driver leaning forward with arms out straight, and a trail of sparks and smoke behind. Another whizz, and the long ladder-wagon shoots across with firemen slinging on their flapping coats, while behind in its wake are borne many small crazed boys, who could no more keep from running than the alarm-bell at the engine-house could keep from ringing when the policeman turned on the circuit. And young boys are not the only ones. No more to be thrilled by this delight—it will mean to be old.

III

At last Grace Church, with its clean light stone, is reached; and the green grass and shrubbery in front of the interesting-looking Gothic rectory. It is a glad relief. And now—in fact, a little before this point—about where stood that melancholy building bearing the plaintive sign "Old London Street"—which was used now for church services and now prize-fights and had never been much of a success at anything—about here, the up-town walkers notice (unless lured off to the left by the thick tree-tops of Washington Square to look at the goodliest row of houses in all the island) that the character of Broadway has changed even more than the direction of the street changes. A short distance below the bend all the stores were wholesale, now they are becoming solidly retail. Instead of buyers the people along the street are mostly shoppers. Down there were very few women; up here are very few men. This is especially noticeable when Union Square is reached, with cable-cars clanging around Dead Man's Curve in front of Lafayette's statue. Here, down Fourteenth Street, may be seen shops and shoppers of the most virulent type; windows which draw women's heads around whether they want to look or not, causing them to run you down and making them deaf to your apologies for it. Big dry-goods stores and small millinery shops; general stores and department stores, and the places where the sidewalks are crowded with what is known to the trade as "Louis Fourteenth Street furniture." All this accounts for there being more restaurants now and different smells and another feeling in the air.

From the upper corner of Union Square, with its glittering jewellery-shops and music-stores and publishers' buildings, and its somewhat pathetic-looking hotels, once fashionable but now fast becoming out-of-date and landmarky (though they seem good enough to those who sit and wait on park benches all day), the open spaciousness of Madison Square comes into view, the next green oasis for the up-town traveller. This will help him up the intervening blocks if he is not interested in the stretch of stores, though these are a different sort of shop, and they seem to say, with their large, impressive windows, their footmen, their buttons at the door, "We are very superior and fashionable."

The shoppers, too, are not so rapacious along here, because they have more time; and the clatter is not so great, because there are more rubber-tired carriages in the street. Nor are all these people shoppers by any means, for along this bit of Broadway mingle types of all the different sorts of men and women who use Broadway at all: nuns, actors, pickpockets, detectives, sandwich-men, little girls going to Huyler's, artists on the way to the Players'—the best people and the worst people, the most mixed crowd in town may be seen here of a bright afternoon.

When they get up to Madison Square the crowd divides and, as some would have us think, all the "nice" people go to the right, up Fifth Avenue, while all the rest go the left, up the Broadway Rialto and the typical part of the Tenderloin. But when Madison Square is reached you have come to one of the Places of New York. It is the picture so many confirmed New Yorkers see when homesick, Madison Square with the sparkle of a clear, bracing October morning, the creamy Garden Tower over the trees, standing out clear-cut against the sky, Diana on top glistening in the sun; a soft, purple light under the branches in the park, a long, decorative row of cabs waiting for "fares," over toward the statue of Farragut, and lithe New York women, wearing clothes as they alone know how to wear them, crossing Fifth Avenue at Twenty-third Street while a tall Tammany policeman holds the carriages back with a wave of his little finger.

It is all so typically New York. Over on the north side by the Worth monument I have heard people exclaim, "Oh, Paris!" because, I suppose, there is a broad open expanse of asphalt and the street-lights are in a cluster, but it seems to me to be as New Yorkish as New York can be. It has an atmosphere distinctively its own—so distinctly its own that many people, as I tried to say on an earlier page, miss it entirely, simply because they are looking for and failing to find the atmosphere of some other place.

IV

Now this last lap of the walk—from green Madison Square and the new Martin's up the sparkling avenue to the broad, bright Plaza at the Park entrance, where the brightly polished hotels look down at the driving, with their awnings flapping and flags out straight—makes the most popular part of all the walk.

This is the land of liveried servants and jangling harness, far away, or pretending to be, from work and worry; this is where enjoyment is sought and vanity let loose—and that, with the accompanying glitter and glamour, is always more interesting to the great bulk of humanity.

It is also better walking up here. The pavements are cleaner now and there is more room upon them. A man could stand still in the middle of the broad, smooth walk and look up in the air without collecting a crowd instantaneously. You can talk to your companion and hear the reply since the welcome relief of asphalt. Here can be seen hundreds of those who walk for the sake of walking, not only at this hour but all day long. In the morning, large, prosperous-looking New Yorkers with side-whiskers and well-fed bodies—and, unintentionally, such amusing expressions, sometimes—walking part way, at least, down to business, with partly read newspapers under their arms; while in the opposite direction go young girls, slender, erect, with hair in a braid and school-books under their arms and well-prepared lessons.

Then come those that walk at the convenience of dogs, attractive or kickable, and a little later the close-ranked boarding-school squads and the cohorts of nurse-maids with baby-carriages four abreast, charging everyone off the sidewalk. Next come the mothers of the babies and their aunts, setting out for shopping, unless they have gone to ride in the Park, and for Guild Meetings and Reading Clubs and Political Economy Classes and Heaven knows what other important morning engagements, ending, perhaps, with a visit to the nerve-specialist.

And so on throughout the morning and afternoon and evening hours, each with its characteristic phase, until the last late theatre-party has gone home, laughing and talking, from supper at Sherry's or the Waldorf-Astoria; the last late bachelor has left the now quiet club; the rapping of his cane along the silent avenue dies away down an echoing side-street; and a lonely policeman nods in the shadow of the church gate-post. Suddenly the earliest milk-wagon comes jangling up from the ferry; then dawn comes up over the gas-houses along East River and it all begins over again.

But the most popular and populous time of all is the regular walking-home hour, not only for those who have spent the day down toward the end of the island at work, but for those who have no more serious business to look after than wandering from club to club drinking cocktails, or from house to house drinking tea.

All who take the walk regularly meet many of the same ones every day, not only acquaintances, but others whom we somehow never see in any other place, but learn to know quite well, and we wonder who they are—and they wonder who we are, I suppose. Pairs of pink-faced old gentlemen, walking arm-in-arm and talking vigorously. Contented young couples who look at the old furniture in the antique-shop windows and who are evidently married, and other younger couples who evidently soon will be, and see nothing, not even their friends. Intent-browed young business men with newspapers under their arms; governesses out with their charges; bevies of fluffy girls with woodcock eyes, especially on matinÉe day with programmes in their hands, talking gushingly.

It is a sort of a club, this walking-up-the-avenue crowd; and each member grows to expect certain other members at particular points in the walk, and is rather disappointed when, for instance, the old gentleman with the large nose is not with his daughter this evening. "What can be the matter?" the rest of us ask each other, seeing her alone.

There is one man, the disagreeable member of the club, a bull-frog-looking man of middle age with a Germanic face and beard, a long stride, and a tightly buttoned walking-coat (I'm sure he's proud of his chest), who comes down when we are on the way up and gets very indignant every time we happen to be late. His scowl says, as plainly as this type, "What are you doing way down here by the Reform Club? You know you ought to be passing the Cathedral by this time!" And the worst of it is, we always do feel ashamed, and I'm afraid he sees it.

This mile and a half from where Flora McFlimsey lived to the beginning of the driving in the Park is not the staid, sombre, provincial old Fifth Avenue which Flora McFlimsey knew. Up Fifth Avenue to the Park New York is a world-city.

Not merely have so many of the brownstone dwellings, with their high stoops and unattractive impressiveness, been turned over to business or pulled down altogether to make room for huge, hyphenated hotels, but the old spirit of the place itself has been turned out; the atmosphere is different.

The imported smartness of the shops, breeches makers to His Royal Highness So-and-So, and millinery establishments with the same Madame Luciles and Mademoiselle Lusettes and high prices, that have previously risen to fame in Paris and London, together with the numerous clubs and picture-galleries, all furnish local color; but it is the people themselves that you see along the streets, the various languages they speak, their expression of countenance, the way they hold themselves, the manner of their servants—in a word, it is the atmosphere of the spot that makes you feel that it is not a mere metropolis, but along this one strip at least our New York is a cosmopolis.

And the Walk-Up-town hour is the best time to observe it, when all the world is driving or walking home from various duties and pleasures.

There, on that four-in-hand down from Westchester County comes a group of those New Yorkers who, unwillingly or otherwise, get their names so often in the papers. The lackey stands up and blows the horn and they manage very well to endure the staring of those on the sidewalks.

Here, in the victoria behind them, is a woman who worships them. She would give many of her husband's new dollars to be up there too, though pretending not to see the drag. See how she leans back in the cushions and tries to prop her eyebrows up, after the manner of the Duchess she once saw in the Row. She succeeds fairly well, too, if only her husband wouldn't spoil it by crossing his legs and exposing his socks.

Here are other women with sweet, artless faces who do not seem to be strenuous or spoiled (as yet) by the world they move in, and these are the most beautiful women in all the world; some in broughams (as one popular story-writer invariably puts his heroines), or else walking independently with an interesting gait.

Here, in that landau, comes the latest foreign-titled visitor, urbane and thoughtfully attentive to all that his friends are saying and pointing out to him. And here is a bit of color, some world-examining, tired-eyed Maharajah, with silk clothes—or was it only one of the foreign consuls who drive along here every day.

There goes a fashionable city doctor, who has a high gig, and correspondingly high prices, hurrying home for his office hours. Surely, it would be more comfortable to get in and out of a low phaËton; this vehicle is as high as that loud, conspicuous, advertising florist's wagon—can it be for the same reason?

Here in that grinding automobile come a man and two women on their way to an East Side table d'hÔte, to see Bohemia, as they think; see how reckless and devilish they look by anticipation! Up there on that 'bus are some people from the country, real people from the real country, and their mouths are open and they don't care. They are having much more pleasure out of their trip than the self-conscious family group entering that big gilded hotel, whose windows are constructed for seeing in as well as out (and that is another way of advertising).

Here comes a prominent citizen outlining his speech on his way home to dress for the great banquet to-night, for he is a well-known after-dinner orator, and during certain months of the year never has a chance to dine at home with his family. Suppose, after all, he fails of being nominated!

Here come a man and his wife walking down to a well-known restaurant—early, so that he will have plenty of time to smoke at the table and she to get comfortably settled at the theatre with the programme folded before the curtain rises; such a sensible way. He is not prominent at all, but they have a great deal of quiet happiness out of living, these two.

And there goes the very English comedian these two are to see in Pinero's new piece after dinner, though they did not observe him, to his disappointment. It is rather late for an actor to be walking down to his club to dine, but he is the star and doesn't come on until the end of the first act, and his costume is merely that same broad-shouldered English-cut frock coat he now has on. We, however, must hurry on.

Because it keeps the eyes so busy, seeing all the people that pass, one block of buildings seems very much like another the first few times the new-comer takes this walk, except, of course, for conspicuous landmarks like that of the new library on the site of the late reservoir or the Arcade on the site of the old Windsor Hotel, with its ghastly memories; but after awhile all the blocks begin to seem very different; not only the one where you saw a boy on a bicycle run down and killed, or where certain well-known people live, but the blocks formerly considered monotonous. There are volumes of stories along the way. Down Twenty-ninth Street can be seen, so near the avenue and yet so sequestered, the Church of the Transfiguration, as quaint and low and toy-like as a stage-setting, ever blessed by stage-people for the act which made the Little Church Around the Corner known to everyone, and by which certain pharisees were taught the lesson they should have learned from the parable in their New Testament. Farther up is a church of another sort, where Europeans of more or less noble blood marry American daughters of acknowledged solvency, while the crowd covers the sidewalks and neighboring house-steps. Here, consequently, other people's children come to be married, though neither, perhaps, attended this church before the rehearsal, and get quite a good deal about it in the society column too, though, to tell the truth, they had hoped that the solemn union of these two souls would appropriately call forth more publicity. Shed a tear for them in passing. There are many similar disappointments in life along this thoroughfare.

Farther back we passed what a famous old rich man intended for the finest house in New York, and it has thus far served chiefly as a marble moral. Its brilliance is dingy now, its impressiveness is gone, and its grandeur is something like that of a Swiss chalet at the base of a mountain since the erection across the street of an overpowering, glittering hotel.

This is the region of clubs; they are more numerous than drug-stores, as thick as florists' shops. But it seems only yesterday that a certain club, in moving up beyond Fortieth Street, was said to be going ruinously far up-town. Now nearly all the well-known clubs are creeping farther and farther along, even the old Union Club, which for long pretended to enjoy its cheerless exclusiveness down at the corner of Twenty-first Street, stranded among piano-makers and publishers, and then with a leap and a bound went up to Fiftieth Street to build its bright new home.

Soon the new, beautiful University Club at Fifty-fourth Street, with the various college coats of arms on its walls, which never fail to draw attention from the out-of-town visitors on 'bus-tops, will not seem to be very far up-town, and by and by even the great, white Metropolitan will not be so much like a lonely iceberg opposite the Park entrance. I wonder if anyone knows the names of them all; there always seem to be others to learn about. Also one learns in time that two or three houses which for a long time were thought to be clubs are really the homes of former mayors, receiving from the city, according to the old Dutch custom, the two lighted lamps for their doorways. This section of the avenue where, in former years, were well-known rural road-houses along the drive, is once more becoming, since the residence rÉgime is over, the region of famous hostelries of another sort.

There is just one of the old variety left, and it, strangely enough, is within a few feet of two of the most famous restaurants in America—the somewhat quaint and quite dirty old Willow Tree Cottage; named presumably for the tough old willow-tree which still persistently stands out in front, not seeming to mind the glare and stare of the tall electric lights any more than the complacent old tumble-down frame tavern itself resents the proximity of Delmonico's and Sherry's, with whom it seems to fancy itself to be in bitter but successful rivalry—for do not all the coachmen and footmen flock there during the long, wet waits of winter nights, while the dances are going on across at Sherry's and Delmonico's? Business is better than it has been for years.

In time, even the inconspicuous houses that formerly seemed so much alike become differentiated and, like the separate blocks, gain individualities of their own, though you may never know who are the owners. They mean something to you, just as do so many of the regular up-town walkers whose names you do not know; fine old comfortable places many of them are, even though the architects of their day did try hard to make them uncomfortable with high, steep steps and other absurdities. When a "For Sale" sign comes to one of these you feel sorry, and finally when one day in your walk up-town you see it irrevocably going the way of all brick, with a contractor's sign out in front, blatantly boasting of his wickedness, you resent it as a personal loss.

It seems all wrong to be pulling down those thick walls; exposing the privacy of the inside of the house, its arrangement of rooms and fireplaces, and the occupant's taste in color and wall decorations. Two young women who take the walk up-town always look the other way when they pass this sad display; they say it's unfair to take advantage of the house. Soon there will be a deep pit there with puffing derricks, the sidewalk closed, and show-bills boldly screaming. And by the time we have returned from the next sojourn out of town there will be an office-building of ever-so-many stories or another great hotel. Already the sign there will tell about it. You quicken your pace as you draw near the Park; some of the up-town walkers who live along here have already reached the end of their journey and are running up the steps taking out door-keys. The little boy in knickerbockers who seems responsible for lighting Fifth Avenue has already begun his zigzag trip along the street; soon the long double rows of lights will seem to meet in perspective. A few belated children are being hurried home by their maids from dancing-school; their white frocks sticking out beneath their coats gleam in the half light. Cabs and carriages with diners in them go spinning by, the coachmen whip up to pass ahead of you at the street-crossing; you catch a gleam of men's shirt-bosoms within and the light fluffiness of women, with the perfume of gloves. Fewer people are left on the sidewalks now—those that are look at their watches. The sun is well set by the time you reach the Plaza, but down Fifty-ninth Street you can see long bars of after-glow across the Hudson.

In the half-dark, under the Park trees, comes a group of Italian laborers; their hob-nailed shoes clatter on the cement-walk, their blue blouses and red neckerchiefs stand out against the almost black of the trees; they, too, are walking home for the night. The Walk Up-town is finished and the show is over for to-day.