ning himself beneath his bush and swinging dragon, watching the dust for travelers, would be amazed at the advancement of the inn. Dear pilgrim, put money in thy purse and wire ahead! On these streets there is a roar of traffic that Babylon never heard. Nineveh in its golden age could have packed itself with all its splendid luggage in a single building. Athens could have mustered in a street. Our block parties -neighborhood affairs in fancy costumes, with a hot trombone, and banners stretched from house to house-produce as great an uproar as ever arose upon the Acropolis. And lately, when our troops returned from overseas and marched beneath our plaster arches, Rome itself could not have matched the largeness of our triumph. Here, also, men climbed up to walls and battlements, but to what far dizzier heights! To towers and windows and to chimney-tops.

And by what contrast shall we measure our tall buildings? The tower of Babel, if set opposite Wall Street, would squat as low as Trinity. For its top, when confusion broke off the work, could scarcely have advanced more than seven stories from the pavement. My own windows, dwarfed by my surroundings, look down from as great a height. Indeed, I fancy that if the famous tower were my neighbor to the rear, on Ninth Avenue, just off the El, its ancient masons on the upmost platform could have scraped acquaintance with our cook. They could have gossiped at the noon hour, from gutter to sink, and could have eaten the crullers that the kind creature tossed across. Our whistling groceryman would have found a rival. And yet the good folk of the older Testament were in amazement at the tower, and strangers came in from Gilead and Beersheba. Trippers, as it were, upon a holiday, staff in hand and pomegranates in a papyrus bag, with locusts and wild honey or manna to sustain them in the wilderness on their return-trippers, I repeat, cocked back their heads, counted the rows of windows to the top, and went off to their far land marveling.

The Bankers Trust Building culminates in a pyramid. Where this narrows to a point there issues a streamer of smoke. I am told that inside this

pyramid, at a dizzy height above the street, there is a storage-room for gold. Is it too fanciful to think that inside, upon this unsunned heap of metal, there may be concealed an altar of Mammon, with priests to feed the fire, and that this smoke, rising in the lazy air, is sweet in the nostrils of the god?

There is what seems to be a chapel on the roof of the Bush Terminal. Gothic decoration marks our buildings, the pointed arch, mullions, and gargoyles. There are few nowadays to listen to the preaching of the church, but it is at least a pretty ornament on our commercial towers.

Nor in the general muster of our sights must I forget the magic view from across the river in the end of afternoon when the lower city is still lighted. It is for the eye of one who travels from Staten Island in the evening mist that towers of finest gossamer arise. They are built to furnish a fantastic dream. The architect of the summer clouds has tried here his finer hand.

It was only lately, when our boat came around the point of Governor's Island, that I noticed how sharply the chasm of Broadway cuts the city. It was the twilight of a winter day. A rack of sullen clouds lay across the sky as if they met for mischief, and the water was black with wind. In the threatening obscurity the whole island seemed a larger House of Usher, intricate with many buildings, cleft in its middle, and ready to fall prostrate into the dark waters of the tarn. But until the gathering tempest rises and an evil moon peers through the crevice, as in the story, we must judge the city to be safe.

Northward are nests of streets thick with children. One might think that the old woman who lived in a shoe dwelt hard by. Children scurry under foot, oblivious of contact. They shoot their marbles between our feet, and we are the moving hazard of their score. They chalk their games upon the pavement. Base-ball fits itself between the gutters, and is long and thin, like Alice after she drank out of the bottle with the pink label. Peddlers' carts line the curb,carrots, shoes, and small hardware,and there is shrill chaffering all the day.

Here are dim restaurants with smells for their advertisement. In one of these, where I was served unleavened bread, folk from Damascus would have felt at home. The loaf was rolled out thin, like a chair-pad that a monstrous fat man has sat on. Indeed, I looked sharply at my ample waiter, on the chance that it was he who had taken his ease upon my bread. If Kalamazoo would tire for a night of its electric signs and would walk these streets of foreign population, how amazing would be its letters home!

Our Greenwich Village, also, has its sights. Time was when we were really a village beyond the city. Even more remotely there were farms, and comfortable burghers jogged up from town to find the peace of country. There was a swamp where Washington Square now is, and quite lately masons demolishing a foundation struck into a conduit of running water, which still drains our pleasant park. When Broadway was a muddy post-road ducks quacked about us. And then a hundred years went by, and the breathless city jumped to the north and left us a village in its heart.

It really is a village. The grocer gives you credit without question. His cat rubs against your bundles on the counter. The shoemaker inquires how your tapped soles are wearing. The bootblack, without lifting his eyes, knows you by the knots in your shoe-laces. I fear he beats his wife, for he has a great red

nose.

Since the dry law passed I have been watching to see whether it begins to pale its ineffectual fire. The little woman at the corner offers you the right paper before you speak. The cigar man tosses you your cigarettes as you enter. Even the four corners beyond Berea, remote, quite off the general travel, could hardly be more familiar with the preference of its oldest citizen. We need only a common pump, and a pig and chickens in the street.

Our gossip is smaller than is found in cities. If we had yards, we would talk across the fences on Monday, with clothes-pins in our mouths, and pass our ailments down the street.

But we are crowded close, wall to wall. I see my neighbor cooking across the street. Each morning she jolts her

dust-mop out of the window. shadows on the curtain as a family sits before the fire. A novelist is down below. By the frenzy of his fingers on the type-writer it must be a tale of great excitement. He never pauses or looks for plots on the ceiling. At night he reads his pages to his patient wife. In another window a girl lies abed every morning. Exactly at 7:45, after a few minutes of sleepy stretching, I see her slim legs come from the coverlet. Your stockings, my dear, hang across the radiator.

We have odd characters, too, known to everybody, just as small towns have. In other circumstance they would whittle on the bench outside the post-office. The father of a famous poet, but himself unknown except hereabouts, has his chair in the corner of a restaurant, and he offers wisdom and reminiscence to a coterie. He is our Johnson at the Mitre. Old M- who lives in the alley in what was once a hay-loft, is known from Fourth to Twelfth streets for his curry and his knowledge of the older poets. It is his pleasant custom to drop in on his friends from time to time and cook their dinner. He tosses you an ancient sonnet as he stirs the pot, or he beats time with his spoon to a melody of the "Pathétique." Every morning, it is said, until the drought set in he issued from the alley for a toddy to sustain his seventy years. He was sometimes without tie or collar on these quick excursions, yet with the manners of the Empire and a sweeping bow if he met any lady of his acquaintance.

All of us know Tinck, who gives a yearly dinner at an Assyrian restaurant, sixty cents a plate, with 2.75 beer extra from a saloon across the way. By an agreeable informality any guest may bring a friend by giving warning, so that the table may be stretched. As many as eighty of us have crowded so close that we could n't wiggle our elbows.

The chief poet of our village wears a corduroy suit and goes without his hat. If a comedy of his happens to be playing at a little theater, he rings a bell in his favorite restaurant and makes the announcement in true Elizabethan fashion. His hair is always tousled, but as its confusion continues from March

into the quieter months, the disarrangement must proceed from the poetic storms inside.

Then we have a kind of battered Peter Pan grown to shiny middle life, who makes ukuleles for a living. On any night of special celebration he is prevailed upon to mount a table and sing one of his own songs to this accompaniment. These songs tell what a merry wicked crew we are. If any folk are down from the upper hotels, he consents to sell a ukulele between his encores. Here, my dear pilgrims, is an entertainment to be squeezed between cabarets.

You are welcome at all our restaurants. The food is good and it is cheap. Grope your way into a basement wherever one of our fantastic signs hangs out or climb broken stairs into a dusty garret, over a contractor's storage of old lumber and bath-tubs, over the litter of the roofs, and you will find artistic folk with flowing ties spreading their elbows at bare tables with unkempt, dripping candles. Here is youth that is blown hither from distant villages-youth that looks from its poor valley to the heights and follows a flame across the darkness, youth whose eyes are a window on the stars. Here also are slim white moths about a candle. And wrinkled children play at art and life.

Here are seething sonneteers, playwrights bulging with rejected manuscript, young women with bobbed hair, and with cigarettes lolling limply at their mouths. For a cigarette hanging loosely from the teeth shows an artistic temperament, as a cigar tilted upward until it warms the nose marks a sharp commercial nature.

But business counts for little with us. Recently, to make a purchase, I ventured of an evening into one of our many small shops of fancy wares. Judge my embarrassment to see that the salesman was entertaining a young lady on his knee. I was too far in for a retreat. Presently the salesman shifted the lady to his other knee and, brushing a lock of hair off his nose, asked me what I wanted. But I was unwilling to disturb his hospitality, so I begged him not to lay down his pleasant burden, but rather to neglect my presence. He thanked me for my courtesy and made his guest

comfortable once more while I fumbled along the shelves. By good luck the price was marked upon my purchase. I laid down the exact change and tiptoed out.

The peddlers of our village, our street musicians, our apple-men, belong to us. They may wander now and then to the outside world, yet they smile at us on their return as at their truest friends. Ice creaks up the street in a little cart and trickles at the cracks. Rags and bottles go by with a jangling bell. Scissors-grinders have a bell, also, with a flat, tinny sound, like the sound of a cow-bell when the cow jerks its head from flies. But it was only the other day that two fellows went by selling brooms. They raised such a clamor that one would have thought the armistice had been signed again. The clatter was so unusual-our merchants generally are of quieter voice that a dozen of us thrust our heads from our windows. The novelist put out his shaggy head. My pretty neighbor below, who is immaculate when I meet her on the stairs, was in a mob-cap.

My dear pilgrim from the West, with your ample house and yard and woodshed, you have no notion how we are crowded on the island. Laundry-tubs are concealed beneath kitchen tables. Boxes for clothes and linen are ambushed under our beds. Any burglar hiding there would snuggle among the moth balls. Sitting-room tables are swept of books for dinner. Bookcases are desks. Desks are beds. And beds are couches. Kitchen chairs turned upside down become step-ladders. If a piece of furniture does not serve two uses, it is a slacker. Beds tumble out of closets. Fire-escapes are nurseries. A patch of roof is a pleasant garden. A bath-room becomes a kitchen, with a lid upon the tub for groceries and the milk cooling below.

A room's use changes with the clock. It was only the other day that I read of a new invention by which a single room becomes four rooms simply by pressing a button. This is the manner of the magic. In a corner, let us say, of a rectangular room there is set into the floor a turn-table ten feet across. On these are built four compartments like

pieces of pie. In one of these is placed a bath-tub and stand, in another a foldingbed and wardrobe; in a third is a kitchen range and cupboard, and in the fourth a bookcase and piano. Must I explain the mystery? On rising you fold away your bed and spin the circle for your tub. And then your stove appears. At last, when you have whirled your dishes to retirement, the piano comes in sight. It is as easy as spinning the caster for the oil and vinegar. A whirling Susie on the supper-table is not more useful. With this device it is estimated that the population of our snug island can be quadruplicated and that the landlords can double their rents with untroubled conscience. Or, by swinging a fifth piece of pie out of the window, a sleeping porch could be added. When the alarm goes off, you have only to spin the disk, and dress in comfort beside the radiator. Or you could-but possibilities are countless.

Tom Paine died on Grove Street. O. Henry lived on Irving Place. The aquarium was once a fort on an island in the river. Later Lafayette was welcomed there. And Jenny Lind sang there. John Masefield swept out a saloon on Sixth Avenue, and they say his broom still stands behind the door.

on Pearl Street he was arrested and taken to hang in chains in London. A restaurant stands now at 119. A bucket of oyster shells is at the door.

But the crowd thickens on these narrow streets. Work is done, and tired folk hurry home. Crowds flow into the subway entrances. The streets are flushed, as it were, with people, but the flood drains to the sewers. lights go out one by one. The great buildings that flared with lights at every window are dark cliffs above us in the wintry mist.

Now the

It is time, dear pilgrim, to seek your hotel or favorite cabaret. Times Square flashes with entertainment. It stretches a glittering web across the night.

Dear pilgrim, a last important word! Put money in thy purse!

OR three seasons of the year Oxford, veiled in soft colors, slumbers among her cloisters, lulled

to sleep by her streams, watched over by her towers-grim, gray sentinels ever alert. But with the coming of autumn she shakes off her lethargy, discards her customary blue grays or silvery greens, and bursts forth into riotous reds and yellows. The same walls that shivered grayly in the winter, blaze with creepers that defy restraint. Creepers straggle across the pebbly walks in the college quads, poking investigating tendrils between the pink, glistening stones. They climb up the elms and the limes, scrambling out on to the farthermost, swaying tips of the branches till their greedy little fingers, always reaching forward, clutch only at the empty air. They scale the students' window-boxes, crowding out the scarlet geraniums and white alyssum, which earlier made a brave show, and peep in through the windows, where perhaps some student lolls at ease, pipe in mouth, himself a spot of color in orange and white, or green and white, blazer.

Heralded by this burst of color, surges in a rich new life. The first-year student, the "fresher," a "fresher," a red-cheeked, clear-eyed youth, as yet free from all taint of ennui, blows through the quiet old streets, glowing in his enthusiasms. He has much to learn, the poor fresher.

Soon he will realize that it is young and bad form to be over-exuberant. But for a month or two life is n't "beastly futile," nor is he "bored to teahs." His diggings are "topping," situated, as he is, just at the point where the dear old High bends and is lost as it goes forward to meet the river. And his don is a "ripping good sort."

But real insight comes with time. It is a matter of pride with the secondyear man that he sees through the surface veneer of everything. He would scorn not to know that his scout, who is a jolly good servant in many respects, looks after his room well, and serves delectable meals, is really a worthless egg, wears his waistcoats, or would if he got the chance, and feeds his family high on the food he poaches from his master. It "fags" him almost to death to see the women students drift into what he considers his own private halls of learning, albeit his eyes may find difficulty in disengaging themselves from the demurely challenging industry of some young girl among the group. The river meadows, bordered by willow stumps, bristling with stiff green arms, are lovely with their wide seas of rippling grass, above which the black-winged swallows rise and dip in gliding flight; even a secondyear man could not perjure himself to say otherwise, but it is a horrid bore to find a beggar waiting for you at every gate along the tow-path, quavering out his blessings. His don may seem "a