any national type of face.  Nevertheless, no man has a type of face so clearly national as the American.  He is acknowledged by it all over the continent of Europe, and on his own side of the water is gratified by knowing that he is never mistaken for his English visitor.  I think it comes from the hot-air pipes and from dollar worship.  In the Jesuit his mode of dealing with things divine has given a peculiar cast of countenance; and why should not the American be similarly moulded by his special aspirations?  As to the hot-air pipes, there can, I think, be no doubt that to them is to be charged the murder of all rosy cheeks throughout the States.  If the effect was to be noticed simply in the dry faces of the men about Wall Street, I should be very indifferent to the matter.  But the young ladies of Fifth Avenue are in the same category.  The very pith and marrow of life is baked out of their young bones by the hot-air chambers to which they are accustomed.  Hot air is the great destroyer of American beauty.

In saying that there is very little to be seen in New York I have also said that there is no way of seeing that little.  My assertion amounts to this; that there are no cabs.  To the reading world at large this may not seem to be much, but let the reading world go to New York, and it will find out how much the deficiency means.  In London, in Paris, in Florence, in Rome, in the Havana, or at Grand Cairo, the cab-driver or attendant does not merely drive the cab or belabor the donkey, but he is the visitor’s easiest and cheapest guide.  In London, the Tower, Westminster Abbey, and Madame Tussaud are found by the stranger without difficulty, and almost without a thought, because the cab-driver knows the whereabouts and the way.  Space is moreover annihilated, and the huge distances of the English metropolis are brought within the scope of mortal power.  But in New York there is no such institution.

In New York there are street omnibuses as we have—­there are street cars such as last year we declined to have, and there are very excellent public carriages; but none of these give you the accommodation of a cab, nor can all of them combined do so.  The omnibuses, though clean and excellent, were to me very unintelligible.  They have no conductor to them.  To know their different lines and usages a man should have made a scientific study of the city.  To those going up and down Broadway I became accustomed, but in them I was never quite at my ease.  The money has to be paid through a little hole behind the driver’s back, and should, as I learned at last, be paid immediately on entrance.  But in getting up to do this I always stumbled about, and it would happen that when with considerable difficulty I had settled my own account, two or three ladies would enter, and would hand me, without a word, some coins with which I had no life-long familiarity, in order that I might go through the same ceremony on their account.