Now, there are men who walk about London just as some men collect books.  They are amateurs of London.  Year by year they add precious souvenirs to their rich collections, the find of an old passage way here, there the view when the light is quite right from one precise spot, say, on Waterloo Bridge.  Sometimes, indeed, they write books about their hobby, more or less useful to the neophyte:  as “A Wayfarer’s London,” or “A Wanderer in London,” or “Ghosts of Piccadilly,” or some such thing; but more frequently they are of the highest type of amateur, the connoisseur who will gladly share his joy in his treasures with a cultivated friend but has nothing of his love to sell.  I doubt whether there are any such amateurs of New York, any who for thirty years and more have walked our streets as an intellectual sport with unabated zest.  London, of course, has the drop on us in the matter of richness of material for this sort of collector, but there is plenty to bag at home.  Not far from the corner of Broadway and Fulton Street, I recollect, is a queer place called Vandewater Street.

Some twenty years or so ago you used to go to melodramas, real melodramas.  There are aesthetic revivals of melodrama in Boston, I hear.  There was nothing aesthetic about the ones I mean, and the enjoyment of them was untainted by the malady of thought.  Come along now.  We’ll dive through Park Row and turn here down Frankfort Street.  Few do turn down Frankfort Street, and I fear its admirable points are unappreciated.  For one thing, it goes down, down, down a very steep incline; which is a spirited thing for a street to do, I think.  And it is very narrow, at the beginning, with sidewalks that hug the walls, and is always in shadow, so that it has a fine, wild, villainous look.  Horses climbing it always come with a plunge and a grinding of sparks.  And the roar from the cobble stones is deafening, very stimulating to the imagination.  The atmosphere is one of typefounders, leather, hides, and oyster houses.

Very few people, I fancy, could tell you where there is a portcullis in New York just like the one at a gateway in The Tower.  But if you snook around the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge you’ll find one, with a winding stair disappearing beyond it, and mounting, presumably, to a dungeon.  Newswomen, I think, are pleasanter to see than newsboys.  There is a newsgirl who minds a stand here at the corner of Rose and Frankfort Streets who is charming as a type of ’Arriet.  She always wears an enormous hat.  A fine thing for a ’Arriet to do, I think.  Sometimes the stand is minded by her mother. (I take it, it is her mother.) An old body who always has her head wrapped in a knitted affair.  A fine thing for an old body to do, I think.  Phil May would have delighted in Frankfort Street.  So would Rembrandt.  Here comes an elderly person, evidently George Luk’s “My Old Pal,” who is balancing a large bundle of sticks on her head.