Page:Works of Jules Verne - Parke - Vol 7.djvu/105



to spend in America! The Great Eastern was to set sail on the 16th of April, and it was now the 9th, and three o'clock in the afternoon, when I set foot on the land of the Union. A week! There are furious tourists and express travelers who would probably find this time enough to visit the whole of North America; but I had no such pretension, not even to visit New York thoroughly, and to write, after this extra rapid inspection, a book on the manners and customs of the Americans. But the constitution and physical aspect of New York is soon seen; it is hardly more varied than a chess-board. The streets, cut at right angles, are called avenues when they are straight, and streets when irregular. The numbers on the principal thoroughfares are a very practical but monotonous arrangement. American cars run through all the avenues. Anyone who has seen one quarter of New York knows the whole of the great city, except, perhaps, that intricacy of streets and confused alleys appropriated by the commercial population.

New York is built on a tongue of land, and all its activity is centered on the end of that tongue; on either side extend the Hudson and East Rivers, arms of the sea, in fact, on which ships are seen and ferry-boats ply, connecting the town on the right hand with Brooklyn, and on the left with the shores of New Jersey.

A single artery intersects the symmetrical quarters of New York, and that is old Broadway, like the Strand of London, and the Boulevard Montmartre of Paris; hardly passable at its lower end, where it is crowded with people, and almost deserted higher up; a street where sheds and marble palaces are huddled together; a stream of carriages, omnibuses, cabs, drays, and wagons, with the pavement for its banks, across which a bridge had been thrown for the traffic of foot passengers. Broadway is New York, and it was there that the Doctor and I walked until evening.

After having dined at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, I ended my day's work by going to the Barnum Theater, where they were acting a play called "The Streets of New York," which attracted a large audience. In the fourth act there