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Presently I lost them, and that was all of it; but this experience, apparently so trivial, cost me all other sensations of first contact with New York. I wandered about for several hours, complaining that all cities are alike. I had dinner, and the food was like food anywhere else. Then I found a hotel and went to bed. My last thought was: Why did she look at me at all?

Her eyes were dark carnelian.

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“Where is one-hundred-and-thirty Broadway?” I asked the hotel porter the next morning.

“One-hundred-and-thirty Broadway? That’s in Wall Street,” he said. “Take the elevated down town and get off at Rector Street.”

That was literal. Broadway is in Wall Street, as may be explained.

Wall street proper,—street with a small s,—is a thoroughfare. Wall Street in another way of speaking,—street with a big S,—is a district, the money district, eight blocks deep by three blocks wide by anything from five to thirty stories high. It is bounded on the north by jewelry, on the northeast by leather, on the east by sugar and coffee, on the south by cotton, on the southwest by shipping and on the west by Greek lace, ship chandlery and Trinity churchyard. It grew that way. The Wall Street station of the elevated railroad is at Rector Street, and Rector Street is a hand-wide thoroughfare running uphill to Broadway under the south wall of Trinity graveyard. When you are half way up you begin to see over the top of the wall, rising to it gradually, and the first two things you see are the tombstones of Robert Fulton and Alexander Hamilton. A few steps more and you are in Broadway. Rector Street ends there.