“My idea was, Doctor, since the ‘Great Eastern’ remains a hundred and ninety-two hours at New York, and as I must return with her, to spend the hundred and ninety-two hours in America. Certainly it is but a week, but a week well spent is, perhaps, long enough to see New York, the Hudson, the Mohawk Valley, Lake Erie, Niagara, and all the country made familiar by Cooper.”
“Ah! you are going to the Niagara!” cried Dean Pitferge. “I’ll declare I should not be sorry to see it again, and if my proposal does not seem very disagreeable to you—”
The worthy Doctor amused me with his crotchets. I had taken a fancy to him, and here was a well-instructed guide placed at my service.
“That’s settled, then,” said I to him.
A quarter of an hour later we embarked on the tender and at three o’clock were comfortably lodged in two rooms of Fifth Avenue Hotel.
CHAPTER XXXV.
A week 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 travellers who would probably find this time enough to visit the whole of North America; but I had no such pretention, 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. Any one 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 centred on the end of that tongue; on either side extend the Hudson and East River, 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, the Strand of London, and the Boulevard Montmartre[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, omnibusses, cabs, drays, and waggons, with the pavement for its banks, across which a bridge has 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 Fifth Avenue Hotel, I ended my day’s work by going to the Barnum Theatre, where they were acting a play called “New York Streets,” which attracted a large audience. In the fourth Act there was a fire, and real fire-engines, worked by real firemen; hence the “great attraction.”