Seeing the Avenue from a stage-top.
The shoppers, too, are not so rapacious along here, because they have more time; and the clatter is not so great, because there are more rubber-tired carriages in the street. Nor are all these people shoppers by any means, for along this bit of Broadway mingle types of all the different sorts of men and women who use Broadway at all: nuns, actors, pickpockets, detectives, sandwich-men, little girls going to Huyler's, artists on the way to the Players'—the best people and the worst people, the most mixed crowd in town may be seen here of a bright afternoon.
When they get up to Madison Square the crowd divides and, as some would have us think, all the "nice" people go to the right, up Fifth Avenue, while all the rest go the left, up the Broadway Rialto and the typical part of the Tenderloin.
But when Madison Square is reached you have come to one of the Places of New York. It is the picture so many confirmed New Yorkers see when homesick, Madison Square with the sparkle of a clear, bracing October morning, the creamy Garden Tower over the trees, standing out clear-cut against the sky, Diana on top glistening in the sun; a soft, purple light under the branches in the park, a long, decorative row of cabs waiting for "fares," over toward the statue of Farragut, and lithe New York women, wearing clothes as they alone know how to wear them, crossing Fifth Avenue at Twenty-third Street while a tall Tammany policeman holds the carriages back with a wave of his little finger.
... people go to the right, up Fifth Avenue.
It is all so typically New York. Over on the north side by the Worth monument I have heard people exclaim, "Oh, Paris!" because, I suppose, there is a broad open expanse of asphalt and the street-lights are in a cluster, but it seems to me to be as New Yorkish as New York can be. It has an atmosphere distinctively its own—so distinctly its own that many people, as I tried to say on an earlier page, miss it entirely, simply because they are looking for and failing to find the atmosphere of some other place.
A seller of pencils.