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Polands and a Scotch highball," was the order. Of which
geographical language I understood not a word.
"See the fresco," my particular friend suggested. And from his tone, at
once modestly content and artificially careless, I knew that that
nursery-rhyme fresco was one of the sights of the pleasure quarter of
New York, and that I ought to admire it. Well, I did admire it. I found it
rather fine and apposite. But the free-luncheon counter, as a sight, took
my fancy more. Here it was, the free-luncheon counter of which the
European reads--generously loaded, and much freer than the air.
"Have something?"
I would not. They could shame me into drinking coffee, but they could
not shame me into eating corned beef and granite biscuits at eleven
o'clock at night. The Poland water sufficed me.
We swept perilously off again into the welter. That same evening three
of my steamer companions were thrown out of a rickety taxi into a hole
in the ground in the middle of New York, with the result that one of
them spent a week in a hotel bed, under doctor and nurse. But I went
scatheless. Such are the hazards of life.... We arrived at a terminus. And
it was a great terminus. A great terminus is an inhospitable place. And
just here, in the perfection of the manner in which my minutest comfort
was studied and provided for, I began to appreciate the significance of
American hospitality--that combination of eager good-nature, Oriental
lavishness, and sheer brains. We had time to spare. Close to the
terminus we had passed by a hotel whose summit, for all my straining
out of the window of the cab, I had been unable to descry. I said that I

should really like to see the top of that hotel. No sooner said than done.
I saw the highest hotel I had ever seen. We went into the hotel, teeming
like the other one, and from an agreeable and lively young dandy
bought three cigars out of millions of cigars. Naught but bank-notes
seemed to be current. The European has an awe of bank-notes,
whatever their value.
Then we were in the train, and the train was moving. And every few
seconds it shot past the end of a long, straight, lighted
thoroughfare--scores upon scores of them, with a wider and more
brilliant street interspersed among them at intervals. And I forgot at
what hundredth street the train paused before rolling finally out of New
York. I had had the feeling of a vast and metropolitan city. I thought,
"Whatever this is or is not, it is a metropolis, and will rank with the best
of 'em." I had lived long in more than one metropolis, and I knew the
proud and the shameful unmistakable marks of the real thing. And I
was aware of a poignant sympathy with those people and those
mysterious generations who had been gradually and yet so rapidly
putting together, girder by girder and tradition by tradition, all unseen
by me till then, this illustrious, proud organism, with its nobility and its
baseness, its rectitude and its mournful errors, its colossal sense of life.
I liked New York irrevocably.

II
STREETS
When I first looked at Fifth Avenue by sunlight, in the tranquillity of
Sunday morning, and when I last set eyes on it, in the ordinary peevish
gloom of a busy sailing-day, I thought it was the proudest thoroughfare
I had ever seen anywhere. The revisitation of certain European capitals
has forced me to modify this judgment; but I still think that Fifth
Avenue, if not unequaled, is unsurpassed.
One afternoon I was driving up Fifth Avenue in the company of an
architectural expert who, with the incredible elastic good nature of

American business men, had abandoned his affairs for half a day in
order to go with me on a voyage of discovery, and he asked me, so as
to get some basis of understanding or disagreement, what building in
New York had pleased me most. I at once said the University Club--to
my mind a masterpiece. He approved, and a great peace filled our
automobile; in which peace we expanded. He asked me what building
in the world made the strongest appeal to me, and I at once said the
Strozzi Palace at Florence. Whereat he was decidedly sympathetic.
"Fifth Avenue," I said, "always reminds me of Florence and the
Strozzi.... The cornices, you know."
He stopped the automobile under the Gorham store and displayed to me
the finest cornice in New York, and told me how Stanford White had
put up several experimental cornices there before arriving at finality.
Indeed, a great cornice! I admit I was somewhat dashed by the
information that most cornices in New York are made