In the terrific confusion of the quay, where groups of passengers were mounted like watch-dogs over hillocks of baggage, Mr. Sachs stood continually between the travellers and the administrative rigour and official incredulity of a proud republic.  And in the minimum of time the fine trunk of Edward Henry and the modest packages of the poet were on the roof of Mr. Sachs’s vast car.  The three men were inside, and the car was leaping, somewhat in the manner of a motor-boat at full speed, over the cobbles of a wide mediaeval street.

“Quick!” thought Edward Henry.  “I haven’t a minute to lose!”

His prayer reached the chauffeur.  Conversation was difficult; Carlo Trent groaned.  Presently they rolled less perilously upon asphalt, though the equipage still lurched.  Edward Henry was for ever bending his head towards the window aperture in order to glimpse the roofs of the buildings, and never seeing the roofs.

“Now we’re on Fifth,” said Mr. Sachs, after a fearful lurch, with pride.

Vistas of flags, high cornices, crowded pavements, marble, jewellery behind glass—­the whole seen through a roaring phantasmagoria of competing and menacing vehicles!

And Edward Henry thought: 

“This is my sort of place!”

The jolting recommenced.  Carlo Trent rebounded limply, groaning between cushions and upholstery.  Edward Henry tried to pretend that he was not frightened.  Then there was a shock as of the concussion of two equally unyielding natures.  A pane of glass in Mr. Seven Sachs’s limousine flew to fragments and the car stopped.

“I expect that’s a spring gone!” observed Mr. Sachs with tranquillity.  “Will happen, you know, sometimes!”

Everybody got out.  Mr. Sachs’s presumption was correct.  One of the back wheels had failed to leap over a hole in Fifth Avenue some eighteen inches deep and two feet long.

“What is that hole?” asked Edward Henry.

“Well,” said Mr. Sachs, “it’s just a hole.  We’d better transfer to a taxi.”  He gave calm orders to his chauffeur.

Four empty taxis passed down the sunny magnificence of Fifth Avenue and ignored Mr. Sachs’s urgent waving.  The fifth stopped.  The baggage was strapped and tied to it:  which process occupied much time.  Edward Henry, fuming against delay, gazed around.  A nonchalant policeman on a superb horse occupied the middle of the road.  Tram-cars passed constantly across the street in front of his caracoling horse, dividing a route for themselves in the wild ocean of traffic as Moses cut into the Red Sea.  At intervals a knot of persons, intimidated and yet daring, would essay the voyage from one pavement to the opposite pavement; there was no half-way refuge for these adventurers, as in decrepit London; some apparently arrived; others seemed to disappear for ever in the feverish welter of confused motion and were never heard of again.  The policeman, easily accommodating himself to the caracolings of his mount, gazed absently at Edward Henry, and Edward Henry gazed first at the policeman, and then at the high decorated grandeur of the buildings, and then at the Assyrian taxi into which Mr. Sachs was now ingeniously inserting Carlo Trent.  He thought: