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“Or, if you hold rather to the Anglo-Saxon temper: the English satisfaction in the serious, the solid, the useful; the English habit of accumulation, experiment, and certain conclusion; and the English ideals of physical and mental health and exercise—these traits and their tangible results are happily still so native to us that they can in no sense be considered foreign.
“But even should your need or desire be for the mere sensations of foreign travel, these also may be had in New York. You may taste strange dishes and hear strange music in more foreign cafés in New York than in any other city in the world. In the local shop of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian tobacco monopoly you may smoke a water-pipe, calling it hookah, chibouque, or nargileh, according to the place in which you would like to be. You may eat real spaghetti and see marionettes enact the story of Roland on Macdougal Street. You need go no farther east than the East Side to buy Damascus inlaid metals, or Chinese medallion ware, or Japanese flowered playing-cards. It is possible, even, to become an importer in a small way, by buying for five dollars, on Allen Street, Russian brasses that cost seven dollars and fifty cents when transported to Twenty-second Street, or ten dollars and seventy-five cents when they arrive on Fifth Avenue. You may hear the service of the Greek Catholic Church, celebrated by an archbishop, in a cathedral on Ninety-seventh Street. Bohemians, Syrians, and even Egyptians have made whole sections of the city practically their own, so far as manners and customs are concerned. Nearly one hundred newspapers and periodicals are published in New York in more than a score of foreign tongues. Perhaps you would care to read a New York daily that is printed in Arabic?”