currents of the city....  You will have then the most grandiose impression that New York is, in fact, inhabited; and that even though the spectacular luxury of New York be nearly as much founded upon social injustice and poverty as any imperfect human civilization in Europe, it is a boon to be alive therein!...  In half an hour, in three-quarters of an hour, the vitality is clean gone out of the street.  The shops have let down their rich gathered curtains, the pavements are deserted, and the roadway is no longer perilous.  And nothing save a fire will arouse Fifth Avenue till the next morning.  Even on an election night the sole sign in Fifth Avenue of the disorder of politics will be a few long strips of tape-paper wreathing in the breeze on the asphalt under the lonely lamps.

* * * * *

It is not easy for a visiting stranger in New York to get away from Fifth Avenue.  The street seems to hold him fast.  There might almost as well be no other avenues; and certainly the word “Fifth” has lost all its numerical significance in current usage.  A youthful musical student, upon being asked how many symphonies Beethoven had composed, replied four, and obstinately stuck to it that Beethoven had only composed four.  Called upon to enumerate the four, he answered thus, the C minor, the Eroica, the Pastoral, and the Ninth.  “Ninth” had lost its numerical significance for that student.  A similar phenomenon of psychology has happened with the streets and avenues of New York.  Europeans are apt to assume that to tack numbers instead of names on to the thoroughfares of a city is to impair their identities and individualities.  Not a bit!  The numbers grow into names.  That is all.  Such is the mysterious poetic force of the human mind!  That curt word “Fifth” signifies as much to the New-Yorker as “Boulevard des Italiens” to the Parisian.  As for the possibility of confusion, would any New-Yorker ever confuse Fourteenth with Thirteenth or Fifteenth Street, or Twenty-third with Twenty-second or Twenty-fourth, or Forty-second with One Hundred and Forty-second, or One Hundred and Twenty-fifth with anything else whatever?  Yes, when the Parisian confuses the Champs Elysees with the Avenue de l’Opera!  When the Parisian arrives at this stage—­even then Fifth Avenue will not be confused with Sixth!

One day, in the unusual silence of an election morning, I absolutely determined to see something of the New York that lies beyond Fifth Avenue, and I slipped off westward along Thirty-fourth Street, feeling adventurous.  The excursion was indeed an adventure.  I came across Broadway and Sixth Avenue together!  Sixth Avenue, with its barbaric paving, surely could not be under the same administration as Fifth!  Between Sixth and Seventh I met a sinister but genial ruffian, proudly wearing the insignia of Tammany; and soon I met a lot more of them:  jolly fellows, apparently, yet somehow conveying to me the suspicion that in