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The pictures that I offer here, however, are not, I am compelled to admit, of that more distinguished and vibrant crust, which my introduction so far would imply. Indeed they are the very antithesis, I think, of all that glitter and glister that made the social life of that day so superior. Its shadow, if you will, its reverse face. For being very much alone at the time, and having of necessity, as the situation stood, ample hours in which to wander here and there, without, however, sufficient financial means to divert myself in any other way, I was given for the most part to rambling in what to me were the strangest and most peculiar and most interesting areas I could find as contrasted with those of great wealth and to speculating at length upon the phases and the forces of life I then found so lavishly spread before me. The splendor of the, to me, new dynamic, new-world metropolis! Its romance, its enthusiasm, its illusions, its difficulties! The immense crowds everywhere—upon Manhattan Island, at least. The beautiful rivers and the bay with its world of shipping that washed its shores. Indeed, I was never weary of walking and contemplating the great streets, not only Fifth Avenue and Broadway, but the meaner ones also, such as the Bowery, Third Avenue, Second Avenue, Elizabeth Street in the lower Italian section and East Broadway. And at that time even (1894) that very different and most radically foreign plexus, known as the East Side, already stretched from Chatham Square and even farther south—Brooklyn Bridge—north to Fourteenth Street. For want of bridges and subways the city was not, as yet, so far-flung but for that reason more concentrated and almost as congested.