I walked through New York late at night, shortly after I landed, and had for companions an Englishman who knew the city well and an American. The roar of the traffic had ceased. The streets were almost deserted. Along Fifth Avenue a few motors rushed swiftly, bearing belated revelers to their homes. Save for them, the city was as nearly silent as any city ever is. We talked. It was the Englishman who spoke first.

"New York and the sound of blasting go together," he said. "They are inseparably connected in my mind. New York is built on rock out of material blasted off rock with dynamite. This fact explains New York. It is the characteristic thing about New York. No other city owes its existence in the same way to the force of explosives shattering rock."

"New York," said the American, "is one of the soldiers of Attila the Hun."

The night was warm. He unbuttoned his overcoat as he spoke and flung it back from his chest. He squared his shoulders, looked up at the immensely lofty buildings on each side of us, looked round at the shadow-patched pavements, fixed his eyes finally on the lamps of a motor which was racing toward us from a great distance along the endless avenue. Then he pursued his comparison.

"Attila's soldier," he said, "went through some Roman city with his club over his shoulder. There were round him evidences of old civilizations which puzzled him. He gazed at the temples, the baths, the theaters with wondering curiosity; but he was conscious that he could smash everything and kill every one he saw. He was the barbarian, but he was also the strong man. New York is like that among the cities of the world."

I contributed a borrowed comment on America.

"An Irishman once told me," I said, "that America isn't a country. It's a great space in which there are the makings of a country lying about. He might have said the same sort of thing about New York. There are the makings of a city scattered round."

"Chunks of blasted rock," said the Englishman.

"The Hun had a lot to learn," said the American, "but he was the strong man. He could smash and crush. Nobody else could."

There is a very interesting story or sketch—I do not know how it ought to be described—by the late "O. Henry"—which he called "The Voice of the City." He imagines that certain American cities speak and each of them utters its characteristic word. Chicago says, "I will." Philadelphia says, "I ought." New Orleans says, "I used to." If I had "O. Henry's" genius I should try to concentrate into phrases the voices of the cities I know. I should like to be able to hear distinctly what they all say about themselves. Belfast, I am convinced, says, "I won't." Dublin occasionally murmurs, "It doesn't really matter." So far I seem to get, but there I am puzzled. I should like to hear what Edinburgh says, what Paris says, what Rome would say if something waked her out of her dream. I should be beaten by London, even if I had all his genius, just as "O. Henry" was beaten by New York. He failed to disentangle the motif from the clamorous tumult of mighty chorus with which that city assails the ear. There is a supreme moment which comes in the Waldstein Sonata. The listener is a-quiver with maddening expectation. He is wrought upon with sound until he feels that he must tear some soft thing with his teeth. Then, at the moment when the passion in him becomes intolerable, the great scrap of melody thunders triumphantly over the confusion and it is possible to breathe again. This is just what does not happen in the case of places like London and New York. A Beethoven yet unborn will catch their melodies for us some day and the sonata of great cities will be written. Till he comes it is better to leave the thing alone. Neither blasting nor dynamite is the keyword. Attila's Hun with his club fails us, though he helps a little. And there is more, a great deal more, about New York than the confused massing of materials on the site of what is to be a temple or a railway station.

When I was in New York they were building a large edifice of some kind in Broadway, not far from Thirty-fifth Street. I used to see the work in progress every day, and often stopped to watch the builders for a while. Whenever I think of New York I shall remember the shrill scream of the air drill which made holes in the steel girders. The essential thing about that noise was its suggestion of relentlessness. Perhaps New York is of all cities the most relentless. The steel suffers and shrieks through a long chromatic scale of agony. New York drills a hole, pauses to readjust its terrible force, and then drills again.

That is one aspect of New York. The stranger cannot fail to be conscious of it. It is brought home to him by the rush of the overhead railway in Sixth Avenue, by the hurry of the crowds in Broadway, by the grinding clamor of the subway trains. It is this, no doubt, which has given rise to the theory that New York is a city of hustle. It seems to me a very cruel thing to say of any people that they hustle. The word suggests a disagreeable kind of spurious activity. The hustler is not likely to be efficient. He makes a fine show of doing things; but he does not, somehow, get much done. The hustler is like a football player who is in all parts of the field at different times, sometimes in the forward line, sometimes among the backs, always breathless, generally very much in the way, and contributing less than any one else to the winning of the game for his side. If New York were a city of hustlers, New York would drill no holes in steel girders.

The fact is that America has, in this matter of hustle, been grossly slandered in Europe. I am not sure that the Americans, with a curious perversity, have not slandered themselves, and done as much as any one to keep the hustle myth alive. The American understands the value of not hurrying as well as any one in the world. He has, justly, a high opinion of himself and declines to be a slave to a wretched machine like a clock. I realized this leisureliness the first time I went into a restaurant to get something to eat. I could have smoked a cigarette comfortably between the ordering and the getting of what I ordered. I could have smoked other cigarettes, calmly, as cigarettes ought to be smoked, between each course. American men do actually smoke in this way during meals, and I trace the custom not to an excessive fondness for tobacco but to the leisurely way in which the business of eating is gone about. And it is not in restaurants only that this quiet disregard of time's abominable habit of going on is evident. The New York business man gets through his work—it is evident that he does get through it—without feeling it necessary to give every one the impression that each half hour of the day is dedicated to a separate affair and that the entire time-table will be reduced to chaos if a single minute strays out of its proper compartment into the next.

Perhaps it is because I am Irish that I like this way of doing business. There is a character in one of the late Canon Sheehan's novels who says that there are two things which are plenty in Ireland—water and time. There are undoubtedly places in the world where water is scarce, the Sahara desert for instance; but I suspect that time is quite abundant everywhere though some people affect to believe that it is not. I know English business men who scowl at you if you venture, having settled the little affair which brought you to their office, to make a pleasant remark about the chances of a general election before Christmas. They pretend that they have not time to talk about General Elections. They do this, as Bob Sawyer used to have himself summoned from church, in order to keep up their reputation. They want you to think that they are overwhelmed with pressing things. I have always suspected that, having got rid of their visitor, they spend hours reading about General Elections in the daily papers. The American business man is, apparently, never too busy to enjoy a chat. He invites you to lunch with him when you go to his office. He shows you the points of interest in the neighborhood after luncheon. He discusses the present condition of Ireland, a subject which demands an immense quantity of time. He settles the little matter which brought you to his office with three sentences and a wave of the hand. He does not write you a letter afterwards beginning: "In confirmation of our conversation to-day I note that you are prepared to——" It is, I suppose, a man's temperament which settles which way of doing business he prefers. It is also very largely a question of temper. In my normal mood I prefer the American method. There is a broad humanity about it which appeals to me strongly. But if I have been annoyed by anything early in the day, broken a bootlace, for instance, or lost a collar stud, I would rather do business in the English way. In the one case I like to come in contact with a fellow man, to feel that he has affections and weaknesses like my own. It is pleasant to get to know him personally. In the other case, thanks to the misfortunes of the morning, I am filled with a gloomy hatred of my kind. I want, until the mood has worn off, to see as little as possible of any one and to keep inevitable people at arm's length. It is much easier to do this when the inevitable people also want to keep me at arm's length, and the English business man generally does. The friendliness of the American business man is a little trying sometimes to any one in a bad temper. Sometimes, not always. I remember one occasion on which I was exceptionally cross. I forget what had happened to me in the morning, but it was worse than breaking a bootlace. It may have had something to do with telephones, instruments which generally drive me to fury. At all events, though in a bad temper, I had to go to see a man in his office. He was a man of extraordinarily friendly spirit, even for an American. I dreaded my interview, fearing that I might say something actually rude before it was over. Nothing could have been more soothing than my reception. This wonderful man cast a single quick glance at me as I entered his office. He realized my condition and got through with the wretched necessity which had brought me there with a rapidity and precision which would have done credit to any Englishman. Then he ushered me out again without making or giving me time to make a single remark of a miscellaneous kind. I apologized to him afterwards. He patted me reassuringly on the shoulder.

"That's all right," he said. "I saw the minute you came into the room that you were a bit rattled."

That seems to me a splendid example of tact. I do not suggest that all American business men have this faculty for swift, self-sacrificing sympathy. It must be rare, even in New York. Does it exist at all in England? If I called on an English merchant some morning when the spring was in my blood and I felt that I wanted to leap and spring like a lamb, would he divine my mood, join hands and dance with me on his hearth rug? I doubt it. He would not do it even if I were a hundred times more important than I am. He would not do it if I were chairman of a fantastically prosperous company. Yet it must have been just as hard for my American friend to be austere as it would be for an Englishman to be inanely gay.

I am not a business man myself. I have for many years practiced the art of getting other people to manage my small affairs for me, so perhaps I ought not to write about business men. But an author is always on the horns of a dilemma. He knows he ought not to write about anything that he does not thoroughly understand. But if he confined himself to those subjects, he would never write anything at all. Even if he gave himself some latitude and allowed himself to write about things of which he knows a little, he would still find himself in a narrow place. His best hope is that if he writes freely on every subject that comes into his head he will only be found out by a few people at a time. Sailors will find him out when he writes about the sea. Insurance agents will laugh at his ignorance when he writes about premiums; doctors will be irritated when he sets down what he thinks about measles. But the sailors will believe that he knows a great deal about insurance and disease in general; doctors will think him an expert about ships, and so forth. And there are always far fewer people in any given profession than there are people out of it. The writer has therefore a good hope that those who find him out in any point in which he touches will always be a minority. Minorities do not matter.

It is the consideration of this fact which gives me courage to write about business men, and more courage now to go on and write about buildings. I know nothing about architecture, but the people who do are very few, so that the penalty of being found out will be light.

There does not seem at first glance to be any connection between business men and architecture. But there is a very real one. There is also a private connection of thought in my own mind. It was from the windows of an office, high up in one of the skyscraper buildings, that I got my first comprehensive view of New York. There is, generally, a certain sameness about these bird's-eye views of cities. The bird, and the man who gets into the position of the bird, sees a number of spires of churches sticking up into the sky and below them a huddled mass of roofs. Sometimes tall chimneys assert themselves beside the spires. But the spires are the dominating things. The chimneys may have every appearance of arrogance, but one feels that they are upstarts. The spires hold the place of a recognized aristocracy. The bird, if he were say an eagle, and had not the sparrow's intimate knowledge of the life of the streets, would naturally come to the conclusion that the worship of God is the most potent factor in the life of the European city. He would, perhaps, be wrong, but he would have a good case to make for himself when he was recounting his experiences to the other eagles.

"I have seen," he would say, "these vast nesting places of men, and the spires of the churches are far the most important things in them. They reach up higher than anything else, and there are great numbers of them."

But the eagle would not say that about New York. It is not spires, nor is it factory chimneys which stick up highest there and catch the attention of a spectator from a height. Office buildings are the dominant things. Churches are kept in what many people regard as their proper place. You can see them if you look for them, but they are subordinate. The same thing is true of another view of New York, that marvelous spectacle of the city's profile which you get in the evening from any of the Hudson River ferry boats. The sky line is jagged and the silhouettes are not those of cross-crowned domes or spires, but of large buildings dedicated to commerce.

The philosophic eagle might, reasoning as he did before, leap to the conclusion that God is of little importance in the city of New York; that bank books there count for more than Bibles. I am not at all sure that he would be right. It looks, any one who has seen New York must admit it, as if the American who coined the phrase, "the almighty dollar," had really expressed the faith of his countrymen. But I am inclined to think that he was led into injustice by a desire to be epigrammatic. It may be that my experience was singularly fortunate, but I came to the conclusion that God counts for a good deal in the life of New York and of America generally. I do not mean that any creed has obtained for itself national recognition, or that any particular church has reached a position analogous to that of the English established church. Religion in America seems to me a confused force, which has not yet fully found itself; but it is a force. The desire to do justly, to love mercy, though scarcely perhaps to walk humbly, is present and is coming to be mightier than the dollar.

Yet it is certainly true that the most striking buildings in New York are not ecclesiastical, but commercial. This is a defiance of the old European tradition, a breach even of that feebler tradition which America took over from Europe before she entered into possession of her own soul. I am reminded of Attila's Hun with his contempt for Roman civilization and his confidence in his own strength.

Business used to look askance at magnificence. It was the pride of the London merchant that he managed mighty affairs in an unpretentious counting house. But we are learning from the Americans. Our insurance companies were the first to start building sumptuous habitations for themselves. Banks and other corporations are following their example. Yet even to-day the offices in the city of London are singularly unimpressive to the eye, and many a house with world-wide influence scorns to appeal to the passerby with anything more striking than a "Push" or "Pull" stamped in worn letters on the brass plates of a pair of swinging doors. It was a great tradition, this total lack of ostentation where mighty forces were. At first New York too felt the attraction of it. Wall Street, which is one of the older parts of the city, is not impressive to look at. The Cotton Exchange is a building of a very middling kind. Yet I am inclined to think that the instinct for magnificence displayed by the newer American captains of commerce is sound. I am not considering the advertisement value of a great building. It may be worth something in that way, though grubbiness can also be an effective advertisement. What seems to lie at the back of the display is the desire of life to express itself in sumptuousness. The Venetians, a nation of merchants, felt this and built in the spirit of it. After all, commerce is a very great kind of life. There is energy in it, adventure, romance. It offers opportunities for struggle, promises victory, threatens defeat. Is it any wonder that men absorbed in it should feel the thrill of the "superbia vitæ" and build to secure visible embodiment for the emotion? Men have always tried to build finely for their governors. Kings' palaces and parliament houses are impressive everywhere. This was right when kings and parliaments were important. Now that the offices of financiers are much more important than the habitations of law makers, they too are becoming splendid.

It is, I suppose, to be expected that these mighty buildings should have forms which at first are repellent in their strangeness. We, who were nursed in an older artistic tradition, have learned to value, perhaps too highly, restraint and dignity. The outstanding characteristics of the American skyscraper seem to me to be exuberance. I am reminded of the wild spirit of one or two European buildings, of the cloisters of Belem, for instance, though there the sense of exultation expresses itself in a very different way. But the essential spirit is similar. I could imagine the builders chanting as they worked: "Behold ye are gods. Ye are all children of the Highest." They are gods who have not experienced the tedium vitæ of Olympian happiness. But New York is not so drunken with exuberance that it can not build with quiet dignity. Tiffany's shop in Fifth Avenue, and, a little lower down, Altman's great department store, are buildings on which the eye rests with undisturbed satisfaction. The men who built these had more in mind than the erection of houses in which rings or stockings might conveniently be sold. They felt that commerce in jewelry or clothes was in itself a worthy thing which might be undertaken in a lofty spirit, and greatly carried on. There is a feeling of nobility in the proportion of windows and doors, in the severity of the street fronts. These might be palaces of noblemen of an ancient lineage. They are—shops. Has America discovered a dignity in shop-keeping? The station of the Pennsylvania Railway is one of the glories of New York, and here again New York is certainly right, though I—it is a purely personal feeling—am infuriated to find the calm self-restraint of the Greeks associated with anything so blatant as a railway train. Anywhere else in the world the great hall of the Central Station would be the nave of a Cathedral. It is impossible not to feel—even when hurrying for a train—that the porters are really acolytes masquerading for a moment in honor of some fantastic fool's day.

The churches of New York are of subordinate interest. Trinity Church has a singularly suggestive position, right opposite the end of Wall Street, God in protest against Mammon. But the building itself might be anywhere in England. I can fancy it in Nottingham or Bath, and there would be no need to alter the place of a stone in it. It is a dignified and beautiful parish church, but it has, as a building, nothing American about it. It has not, apparently, influenced the spirit of New York architecture. The people have not found self-expression in it. St. Patrick's Cathedral, in Fifth Avenue, is a fine, a very fine example of modern Gothic. Except the new Graduate College buildings at Princeton, this cathedral strikes me as the finest example of modern Gothic I have ever seen. But ought New York to have Gothic buildings? Here, I know, I come up against the difficult question. There are those who hold that for certain purposes—for worship and for the dignified ceremonial life of a university—the Gothic building is the one perfect form which man has devised. We cannot better it. All we can do is soak ourselves in the spirit of the men of the great centuries of this style and humbly try to feel as they felt so that we may build as they. It may be granted that we shall devise nothing better. I, for one, gladly admit that St. Patrick's in New York and the Hall at Princeton are conceived in the old spirit and are as perfect as any modern work of the kind is, perhaps as perfect as any modern Gothic work can be. But when all this is said it remains true that the life of New York is not the life of mediæval Rouen, of the London which built Westminster or of the Cologne which paid honor to the Three Kings. Can New York accept as its vision of the divine the conception, however splendid, of those "dear dead days"?

It may well be that I am all wrong in my feeling about modern Gothic, that what is wanting in these buildings is not the spirit which was in the old ones. It may be that, like certain finer kinds of wine, they require maturing. I can conceive that a church which seems remote now, almost to the point of frigidity, may not only seem, but actually be, different two hundred years hence. It is scarcely possible to think that the prayers of generations have no effect upon the walls of the building in which they are uttered. There must cling to the place some aroma, some subtle essence of the reachings after God of generation after generation. The repentances of broken hearts, the supplications of sorrowing women, the vows of strong, hopeful souls, the pieties of meek priests, must be present still among the arches and the dim places above them. Men consecrate their temples, but it takes them centuries to do it. Perhaps Westminster would have left me cold if I had walked its aisles four hundred years ago. This lack of maturity and not, as I suppose, the fact that they do not come of the spirit of our time, may be what is the matter with our newer Gothic buildings.

There is one church in New York—there may be others unknown to me—which gives the impression of having grown out of the life which dwelt in it, in the same sense in which certain English churches, those especially of the Sussex country side, have grown rather than been deliberately and consciously built. This is the unpretentious building known as "The Little Church Round the Corner." The affectionate familiarity of the name suits the place and means more to the discerning soul than any dedication could mean. The student of architecture would perhaps reckon this church contemptible, and having seen it once would bestow no second glance upon it. It is built in no style of recognized orthodoxy. I do not know its history, but it looks as if bits had been added on to it time after time by people who knew nothing and cared nothing for unity of design, but who had in their hearts a genuine love for the building. It is an expression of life, this little church, but not, I think, of the life of New York. It is as if someone had made a little garden and filled it with all kinds of delicate sweet-smelling flowers in a glade of a mighty forest. Within the garden are the flowers, tended and well-beloved. Outside and all around are great trees with gnarled trunks and far-off branches which have fought their own way in desperate competition to the sunlight. I could, I think, worship very faithfully in that "Little Church Round the Corner," but I should have to shut New York out of my heart every time I passed through the doors of it. Just so I can find delight in the sweetness of Keble's "Christian Year," but while I do I must forget the sea, and how "at his word the stormy wind ariseth which lifteth up the waves thereof." I must cease to be in love with the perils of adventuring.

There is one church in New York which seems to me to have caught the spirit of the city, the unfinished cathedral of St. John the Divine. It gives the worshipper within its walls a strange sense of titanic strength striving majestically to express itself in stone. I am told that the building is to be finished in some other way, in accordance with the rules and orthodoxies of some school of architecture. This may not be true, but, even if it is, there still remains the hope that enough has been already done to preserve for the finished work its character of relentless strength. If its builders are brave enough to go as they have begun, this cathedral should rank in the eyes of future generations as one of the great houses of God in the world. St. Mark's, with its fantastic spires and gorgeous coloring, expresses all the past history of Venice and her commerce with the East, all which that strange republic learnt of the Divine, from the glow of Syrian deserts, where sun-baked caravans crawled slowly, and from the heavy scents of Midianitish merchandise in the market places of Damascus. The confused and misty aisles of Westminster embody in stone a realized conception of the tumultuous life of London, of its black river weary with the weight of the untold wealth it bears, of its crowds thronging narrow places, of its streets where past and present look suspiciously into each other's eyes, while things which are to be already push for elbow room. The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, standing on the very edge of its steep, broken hill, gives me as no other building does the sense of strength of the kind of strength which will do rather than endure, which is unwilling to abide restraint of any kind.

The building is a fit mate for the skyscrapers, can hold its own among them because its spirit is their spirit, touched with the flame of inspiration by the torch of the divine. The very absence of unity of style seems the crowning glory of it. It is Attila's Hun once more. What did he care that the spoils in which he decked himself were of various fashionings? It is the dynamite blasting living rock. It is, as it seems to me, New York in process of being given in stone an interpretation which neither words nor music have given her yet. It will be a loss, not only to New York but to the world, if the builders of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine allow themselves to be frightened by the spectre of European artistic tradition. They may tame their church, civilize it, curl and comb the seven locks of its hair. If they do, the strength will surely depart from it and it will become a common thing.

We shall always be thankful that we paid a visit to Atlantic City. It is not, I believe, one of the places of which Americans are particularly proud. The trains which connect it with New York have indeed the reputation of being the fastest in the world, but that may not be because every one is in a great hurry to get to Atlantic City. They run at high speed both ways, and it is quite possible that some men may be in an equal hurry to get away. Our friends were certainly a little cold when we said we were going there. Left to ourselves, or meekly following, as we generally do, the advice given to us by well-instructed people, we should not have gone to Atlantic City. But we were shepherded there by circumstance, fate, or whatever the power is called which regulates the minor affairs of life. And we were glad we went. No one, says Tennyson, can be more wise than destiny. Our visit to Atlantic City went to prove the truth of that profound remark.

The mean which destiny used for getting us to Atlantic City was a play. We had a play of our own, and it was produced there for the first time on the west side of the Atlantic. American theatrical managers believe in experimenting with a play in some minor place before taking the plunge of the New York production. They call this—in a phrase not unknown in England—"trying it on the dog." It seems to me rather a good plan. The verdict of the dog is not indeed of great value. Dogs, human dogs, are the same everywhere. They are afraid to say they like anything which has not got the seal of a great city's approval set on it. They take refuge in damning with dubious phrase; and, in fact, no one with any experience much minds what they say. But the experimental production has a value of its own apart from the opinion of the dog. The company shakes down and learns to work together. The first performance in an important place, when the time comes for it, is much more likely to go smoothly if the actors have faced audiences, even audiences of the dog kind, every night for a week beforehand.

We did not understand the philosophy of these dog productions at first, and were therefore a little nervous all the time we were in Atlantic City, but not, I am glad to say, nervous enough to have our enjoyment of the place spoiled. Nothing would induce me to say, or for a single moment to think, that Atlantic City is in any way a characteristic product of American civilization. All our civilizations produce places of this kind. But it is fair, I think, to say that America does this particular thing better than any other country. Superior people might say that America does it worse; but I am not superior. I recognize that the toiling masses have a right to revel during their brief holidays in the way that appeals to them as most delightful. I do not revel in that way myself; but that is not because I have found better ways, but only because I am growing older and prefer to take my humble pleasures quietly. When I was young I enjoyed tumultuous pleasures as much as any one. I revelled with the best of my day in the town of Douglas; and, if I did not get as much out of it as I might now if I were young again, it was only because there was not, in those days, nearly so much in it. The holiday resort has been enormously developed during the last twenty-five years, and America, judging by Atlantic City—and I am told Coney Island is better—is in the very van of human progress.

I have seen Portrush, our humble Irish attempt at a pleasure city. I have seen Blackpool, which far surpasses Portrush in its opportunities for delight. I have seen the Lido, where the Germans bathe. I have seen Brighton, which is spoiled by a want of abandon and a paralyzing respect for gentility. Atlantic City outdoes them all. Atlantic City is Portrush, Blackpool, Brighton, the Lido, and Ostend rolled into one, and then, in all the essential features of such places, raised to the third power, so to speak; multiplied by itself and then multiplied by itself again.

Our friends, as I have hinted, warned us against Atlantic City. They said:

"You won't enjoy that place."

Or, varying the emphasis in a way very flattering to our reputations for cultivated gentility:

"You won't enjoy that place."

Or, altering the emphasis once more, after we had explained apologetically that we went there on business:

"You won't enjoy that place."

When we persisted in going, they took it for granted that we wanted to argue with them. Then they closed the discussion with an emphatic insistence on the one word which had hitherto escaped them.

"You won't enjoy that place."

One friend, mistaking us for cynical students of the weaknesses and follies of humanity, varied the warning in another way:

"You won't," he said, "enjoy it now. It's not the season."

They were all wrong. In spite of the private anxiety which gnawed at our hearts, we did enjoy Atlantic City. We enjoyed it all the more because we went there out of season. It is our deliberate practice to visit places of this kind out of season, and the date of the production of our play at Atlantic City was a most fortunate one for us. We no longer want to revel. The time for that is past for us, but we do want to understand, and we seem to get nearer that when the chief side shows are closed, when the hotels are being painted, and when the sea has given up the attempt to sparkle and look cheerful. In one of Mr. Anthony Hope's novels there is a statesman of great craftiness who warns a Prince Consort that he must not think he knows the Queen, his wife, because he is allowed to see her in her stays. I daresay there is a good deal in the warning. But I cannot help feeling that you would understand a queen better if you saw her frequently, let us say in her dressing gown, than if you never saw her except in her robes of state, with the crown royal firmly fixed on her head with hairpins. It must be the same with pleasure cities. One knows them, not well, but a little better when they have tucked up their skirts, put on old blouses and turned to the task of cleaning up after the festivities.

It is more instructive to walk along the broad sea front of Blackpool through a fine chill mist of January rain than to stand there on a blazing August day when the colliers' week of holiday is in full swing. Deeper thoughts come to him who gazes at the forlorn rows of notices that lodgings are to let within than to him who hurries through street after street, looking for some place in which to lay his head. I am sure that I catch the essential spirit of the Lido when the November sea is brown, when the sands are drab, when the thousands of bathing boxes stand locked and empty, than I would if smiling wavelets enticed plump Germans to splash in them and bruat paars lingered, indecently affectionate, in the shadows behind. I did once, accidentally, see Portrush in the very height of its season, and it was a disappointment to me. Bevies of girls, hatless but with hair elaborately dressed, paraded the streets with their arms round each others' waists. Critical young men, in well-creased suits of the kind supposed to be suitable for yachting, watched other girls being taught to swim in a deep pool. Nursemaids helped children to build sand castles. Mothers of forty years of age or thereabouts sat uncomfortably knitting with their backs against the rocks. More than five thousand people carried hand cameras about. Lovers, united for a day or two, wrote each others' names in huge letters on the sand, where the retiring tide had left it smooth and dry. There was too much to feel, far too much to think about. I grew confused and desperate. I could not understand. Out of season the observer has a better chance. If Portrush confused me, Atlantic City, seen in its full glory, would have bewildered me utterly. Also out of season I am not tormented with vain regrets. I am spared the vexation of feeling that a yachting suit, carefully creased, would no longer lift my heart up to the skies. It is not forced upon me that my pulses no longer throb wildly at the sight of girls who smile. I do not think how sad it is that I shall never again want to win the applause of a crowd by taking a header into deep water from a giddy height. I am glad that we visited Atlantic City out of season.

I forget how many piers Atlantic City has, but it is unusually rich in these structures, and I have no doubt that the builders of them were wise. A pier makes an irresistible appeal to the pleasure-seeker. He would rather dance on a pier, under proper shelter, of course, and on a good floor, than in a well-appointed salon on solid land. He would rather eat ices on a pier than in an ordinary shop, though he has to pay more for them, the cost of the ice being the same and the two pence for entry into the enchanted region being an extra. A cinematograph show draws more customers if it is on a pier. The reason of this is that the normal and properly constituted holiday-maker wants to get as much sea as he can. When he is not in it he likes to have it all round him, or as nearly all round him as possible without going in a boat. Boats, for several reasons, are undesirable. They sometimes make people sick. They are expensive. They demand an undivided allegiance. You cannot have a cinematograph, for instance, in a boat. The nearest thing to a boat is a pier. It is almost surrounded by the sea. That is why piers are a regular feature of up-to-date pleasure cities, and why Atlantic City has so many of them. It is all to the credit of our revelers that they love to be near the sea, to feel it round them, to hear it splashing under their feet. The sea is the cleanest thing there is. You can vulgarize it, but it is almost impossible, except at the heads of long estuaries, to dirty it. It seems as if pleasure-seekers, who are also seekers of the sea, must be essentially clean people, clean-hearted, otherwise they would not feel as strongly impelled as they evidently do to get into touch with the ocean. And it is real ocean at Atlantic City. Far out one sees ships passing, the lean three-masted schooners of the American coasting trade, trawlers in fleets, tramp steamers, companionless things, all of these given to the real business of the sea, not to pleasure voyaging. The eye lingers on them, and it is hard afterwards to adjust the focus of the mental vision to the long wooden parade, itself almost a pier, the flaunting sky signs, the innumerable tiny shops where every kind of useless thing is sold. Atlantic City has, indeed, some boats of its own, boats which go out from a haven tucked away behind the north corner of the parade, and pass up and down across the sea front. Their sails are covered with huge advertisements of cigarettes and chewing gums. They are manned, no doubt, by the kind of longshoremen who cater for the trippers' pleasure. They have in them as passengers whoever in America corresponds to the London cockney. Among ships which sail these are surely as the women of the streets. But you cannot altogether degrade a boat. She retains some pathetic remnant of her dignity, even if you make her sails into advertisement hoardings. It was good to watch these boats, their masts set far forward, after the American catboat fashion, making short, swift tacks among the sand banks over which the Atlantic rollers foamed threateningly.

It is easy to understand why the shops along seafronts of places like Atlantic City are for the most part devoted to the sale of useless things. Picture postcards I reckon to be very nearly useless. They give a transient gleam of pleasure to the buyer, none at all to the person who receives them. The whole class of goods called souvenirs is entirely useless. The photographs taken by seaside artists are not such as can give any satisfaction to the sitters afterwards. Yet the impulse to buy these things and to be photographed is almost irresistible. We yielded, not to the seductions of the photographers, nor to the lure of the souvenir-sellers, but with shameless self-abandonment to the postcard shops. I found it very hard to pass any of them without buying. I still have many of the Atlantic City postcards, and I look at them whenever I feel in danger of growing conceited in order to reduce myself to a proper condition of humility. We also—moved by what strange impulse?—bought several instruments for cutting up potatoes. Under ordinary circumstances a potato-chopper has no attractions whatever for me. I could pass a shop window filled with them and not feel one prick of covetous desire. And Atlantic City, of all places in the world, was for us—I suppose in some degree for every visitor—most unsuitable for the purchase of kitchen utensils. We knew, even while we bought them, that we should have to haul them with us round America and back across the Atlantic, that they would be a perpetual nuisance to us all the time, and in all probability no use whatever when we got them home. Yet we bought them. If the dollar we spent on them had been the last we possessed we should have bought them all the same. Such is the strange effect of places like Atlantic City on people who are in other places sane enough. I can analyze and understand the impulse well enough though I cannot resist it. It is the holiday spirit of the place which gets a hold on visitors. All a whole long year we commonplace people, who are not millionaires, are spending our money warily on things of carefully calculated usefulness. We watch each shilling and see that it buys its full worth of something which will make life more tolerable or pleasant. Then comes the brief holiday, and with it the sudden loosing of all bonds of ordinary restraint. Our souls revolt against spending money on things which are any real good to us. We want, we are compelled to fling it from us, asking in exchange nothing but trifles light as air. In desperate reaction against the tyranny of domestic economics we even insist on buying things, like potato cutters, which will be an actual encumbrance to us afterwards.

Cowper represents John Gilpin's wife as insisting on taking her own wine on a pleasure party and writes of her that

I refuse to believe that of any human being, and I count Cowper a good poet but a bad psychologist. The man who brought a load of potato-cutters down to Atlantic City was probably not a poet at all, but he had a profound knowledge of human nature. He knew that he would sell the things there. It was the place of all places in the world for his trade. It is a high tribute to Atlantic City as a holiday resort that it forced us to buy two of these machines. None of the other pleasure cities we have visited have had such a drastic effect upon us. Postcards we yield to everywhere. Even the dreariest of second-rate watering places can sell them to us. In Blackpool I found a paper-knife irresistible. In Portrush I once bought a colored mug. Atlantic City alone could have sold me potato-choppers, two of them.

In towns and rural districts where men and women live their ordinary lives, work, love and ultimately die, it is the rarest thing possible to see any grown person wheeled about in a perambulator or bath chair. Occasionally some pitiful victim of a surgeon's skill is lifted out of the door of a nursing home and placed tenderly in one of these vehicles. He is wheeled about in the fresh air in obedience to the doctor's orders, no doubt in hope that he will recover sufficient strength to make another operation possible. But a bath chair, even now when surgery has become a recognized form of sport, is a very unusual sight. In all pleasure cities it is quite common. In Brighton, for instance, or at Bournemouth, any one who can, with any chance of being believed, represent himself as an invalid, takes advantage of his infirmity to get himself wheeled about in a bath chair. At international exhibitions and in some of the greater picture galleries which are also pleasure resorts it is generally possible to hire a bath chair. Atlantic City, being, as I believe, the greatest of all such places, has devised a kind of glorified perambulator, something far more seductive than a bath chair. It has room for two in it, and this in itself is a great advance. It has the neatest imaginable hood, which you can pull over you in case of rain or if you desire privacy. It looks something like a very small but sumptuously appointed motor car.

You need not even pretend to be a cripple in Atlantic City in order to make good your right to enter one of these chairs. All sorts of people, brisk-looking young girls and men whose limbs are plainly sound, are wheeled about, not only shamelessly but with evident enjoyment. There are immense numbers of these vehicles, more, surely, than there are invalids in the whole world. Out of season, when we saw them, they are absurdly cheap, almost the only thing in America except oysters and chocolates, and, curiously enough, silk stockings, which are cheap judged by European standards. I longed very earnestly to go in one of these vehicles, but at the last moment I always shrank from the strangeness of it. Neither the taxi of the London streets nor the outside car of my native land ever made so strong an appeal to me as these perambulators of Atlantic City. I suppose it was the holiday spirit of the place again. Girls and young men, certainly middle-aged men, would feel like fools if they sat in perambulators anywhere else, but it is a sweet and pleasant thing—according to a Latin poet who must have known—to play the fool in the proper place. Atlantic City is the proper place. Hence the enormous numbers of perambulators.

The hotels in Atlantic City are, most of them, as fantastic in appearance as the place itself. I imagine that the architects who planned them must, before they began their work, have been kept for weeks on the sea-front and forced to go to all the entertainments which offered themselves by day and night. They were probably fed on crab dressed in various ways and given gin rickeys to drink. Then, when allowed to drop to sleep in the early morning, they would naturally dream. At the end of a fortnight or so of this treatment their dreams would be imprinted on their memories and they would draw plans of hotels suitable for Atlantic City. Only in this way, I think, can some of the newer hotels have been conceived. They are not ugly, far from it. Crab, dressed as American cooks dress it, does not induce nightmares, nor is a gin rickey nearly so terrific a drink as it sounds. The architect merely dreams, as Coleridge did when his Kubla Khan decreed a stately pleasure dome in Xamadu. But Coleridge dreamed on opium and his visions were of stately things. The Atlantic City hotel is less stately than fantastic. It is a building which any one would declare to be impossible if he did not see it in actual existence.

It will always be a source of regret to me that I did not stay in one of these hotels which captivated me utterly. It was just what, as a boy, I used to imagine that the palace of the Sleeping Beauty must be. A look at it brought back dear memories of the transformation scenes of pantomimes, in the days before transformation scenes went out of fashion. It was colored pale green all over, and, looked at with half-closed eyes, made me think of mermaids. I am sure that it was perfectly delightful inside; but we did not stay there. A friend had recommended to us another hotel, of great excellence and comfort, but built before Atlantic City understood the proper way to treat architects. In any case we could not have stayed in the pale green hotel. It was closed. We were in Atlantic City out of season.