Page:McClure's Magazine v9 n3 to v10 no2.djvu/445

Rh and thoroughly pleased with himself. Mrs. Dawson put one arm around his shoulder, and as she kissed him, with the other hand deftly extracted the morning paper from his inside pocket—at the same time giving him a most charming and adorable smile.

Dawson's countenance fell. But he decided instantly not to remonstrate—this time. By and by, when she was stronger.

At the steps he paused and said, lightly, "Oh, I forgot: I'll not be home to dinner. Have to dine with some of the boys at the club. Infernal nuisance, this campaign!"

It requires so many exhausting lessons to teach a man anything.

EW YORK, March 22d.—My greatest. surprise is to be surprised so little; and in the mild atmosphere, under a brilliant sun, it does not seem to me that I have changed climates.

Nevertheless I am in America.

But what can you expect ? My eyes and my mind are so fashioned that wherever I have journeyed I have found men more like each other than their vanity might be willing to admit; and doubtless that is not a favorable temper for "observing," but who knows whether it be not an excellent one for seeing better? How many travelers there are whose accounts have aroused in me nothing but a great astonishment at their ingenuity! They discover differences everywhere, and to my eyes these differences do not exist. Europeans or Americans, yellow men or white, Anglo-Saxons or Latins, we all have specimens at home of all the vices; let us add that the same is true of all the qualities and virtues, and repeat with the poet:

. . . I am walking along Fifth Avenue, making these reflections and beginning to fear lest a spice of vexation at not possessing, a more traveled soul may creep into them, when it suddenly occurs to me that this avenue is very long. I also perceive that all the streets cross each other at right angles, and that, motley as the crowd may be which fills them with commotion, numerous as are the car lines by which they are furrowed, unlike and sumptuous as are the shops which line them, the impression they produce is, after all, a trifle monotonous. Fortunately, some tall houses come to dispel this at the very nick of time—very tall houses, of from twelve to fourteen stories; cubical houses with flat roofs; pierced with innumerable windows; stone houses whose crude whiteness enlivens at last this decoration which hitherto has been all in brick. I take pains to note, then, that in New York there are houses of fourteen stories, and, must it be said? they are not uglier than if they had only five. Where is it that I have seen uglier ones, not so tall, but in the same style, or the same taste, which proceeded less from the art of Bramante or Palladio than from the science of Eiffel the engineer? Was it not perchance at Rome, in the new quarters? What astonishes me most, however, and what I can scarcely account for to myself, is that, positively, these enormous houses do not seem to be embedded in the ground; one would say they were placed upon its surface.

I go on to the right, and the aspect of the scene has suddenly changed. The flooring of an aërial railway, supported by enormous cast-iron pillars, has robbed me of sunlight, and the trains which momentarily