Often I ride on a bus top like a maharajah on an elephant, up near the tusks, as it were, where the view is unbroken.  I plan this trip so that I move counter to the procession that goes uptown in the late afternoon.  Is there a scene like it in the world?  The boulevards of Paris in times of peace are hardly so gay.  Fifth Avenue is blocked with motor cars.  Fashion has gone forth to select a feather.  A ringlet has gone awry and must be mended.  The Pomeranian’s health is served by sunlight.  The Spitz must have an airing.  Fashion has wagged its head upon a Chinese vase—­has indeed squinted at it through a lorgnette against a fleck—­and now lolls home to dinner.  Or style has veered an inch, and it has been a day of fitting.  At restaurant windows one may see the feeding of the over-fed.  Men sit in club windows and still wear their silk hats as though there was no glass between them and the windy world.  Footmen in boots and breeches sit as stiffly as though they were toys grown large and had metal spikes below to hold them to their boxes.  They look like the iron firemen that ride on nursery fire-engines.  For all these sights the bus top is the best place.

And although we sit on a modest roof, the shopkeepers cater to us.  For in many of the stores, is there not an upper tier of windows for our use?  The commodities of this second story are quite as fine as those below.  And the waxen beauties who display the frocks greet us in true democracy with as sweet a simper.

My friend G——­ while riding recently on a bus top met with an experience for which he still blushes.

There was a young woman sitting directly in front of him, and when he came to leave, a sudden lurch threw him against her.  When he recovered his footing, which was a business of some difficulty, for the bus pitched upon a broken pavement, what was his chagrin to find that a front button of his coat had hooked in her back hair!  Luckily G——­ was not seized with a panic.  Rather, he labored cautiously—­but without result.  Nor could she help in the disentanglement.  Their embarrassment might have been indefinitely prolonged—­indeed, G——­ was several blocks already down the street—­when he bethought him of his knife and so cut off the button.  As he pleasantly expressed it to the young woman, he would give her the choice of the button or the coat entire.

Reader, are you inclined toward ferry boats?  I cannot include those persons who journey on them night and morning perfunctorily.  These persons keep their noses in their papers or sit snugly in the cabin.  If the market is up, they can hardly be conscious even that they are crossing a river.  Nor do I entirely blame them.  If one kept shop on a breezy tip of the Delectable Mountains with all the regions of the world laid out below, he could not be expected to climb up for the hundredth time with a first exhilaration, or to swing his alpenstock as though he were on a rare holiday.  If one had business across the Styx too often—­although the scenery on its banks is reputed to be unusual—­he might in time sit below and take to yawning.  Father Charon might have to jog his shoulder to rouse him when the boat came between the further piers.