For the hordes of sightseers there had been provided a special contrivance, a huge automobile omnibus which seated thirty or forty people, and went from the Battery to Harlem with a young man shouting through a megaphone a description of the sights.  The irreverent had nicknamed this the “yap-wagon”; and declared that the company maintained a fake “opium-joint” in Chinatown, and a fake “dive” in the Bowery, and hired tough-looking individuals to sit and be stared at by credulous excursionists from Oklahoma and Kalamazoo.  Of course it would never have done for people who had just been passed into Society to climb upon a “yap-wagon”; but they were permitted to get into the subway, and were whirled with a deafening clatter through a long tunnel of steel and stone.  And then they got out and climbed a steep hill like any common mortals, and stood and gazed at Grant’s tomb:  a huge white marble edifice upon a point overlooking the Hudson.  Architecturally it was not a beautiful structure—­but one was consoled by reflecting that the hero himself would not have cared about that.  It might have been described as a soap-box with a cheese-box on top of it; and these homely and familiar articles were perhaps not altogether out of keeping with the character of the humblest great man who ever lived.

The view up the river was magnificent, quite the finest which the city had to offer; but it was ruined by a hideous gas-tank, placed squarely in the middle of it.  And this, again, was not inappropriate—­it was typical of all the ways of the city.  It was a city which had grown up by accident, with nobody to care about it or to help it; it was huge and ungainly, crude, uncomfortable, and grotesque.  There was nowhere in it a beautiful sight upon which a man could rest his eyes, without having them tortured by something ugly near by.  At the foot of the slope of the River Drive ran a hideous freight-railroad; and across the river the beautiful Palisades were being blown to pieces to make paving stone—­and meantime were covered with advertisements of land-companies.  And if there was a beautiful building, there, was sure to be a tobacco advertisement beside it; if there was a beautiful avenue, there were trucks and overworked horses toiling in the harness; if there was a beautiful park, it was filled with wretched, outcast men.  Nowhere was any order or system—­everything was struggling for itself, and jarring and clashing with everything else; and this broke the spell of power which the Titan city would otherwise have produced.  It seemed like a monstrous heap of wasted energies; a mountain in perpetual labour, and producing an endless series of abortions.  The men and women in it were wearing themselves out with toil; but there was a spell laid upon them, so that, struggle as they might, they accomplished nothing.

Coming out of the church, Montague had met Judge Ellis; and the Judge had said, “I shall soon have something to talk over with you.”  So Montague gave him his address, and a day or two later came an invitation to lunch with him at his club.