Life on Broadway (New York City).

street is straight for nearly two miles, when it turns slightly to the northwest, the slender gray spire of Grace Church marking the turning-point. Its name is unjustified by fact: the breadth is inconsiderable, being farther reduced apparently by the great height of most of the buildings, and the surface is depressed as far as Canal Street, where a gentle ascent begins. The variety of architecture is extraordinary. Every material has been used in every style — brick, iron, glass, marble, granite, brown stone, yellow stone, wood, and stucco. Small, modest dwellings of a much earlier period, with old-fashioned dormer-windows projecting from the upper story, and modern plate-glass show windows inserted in the lower story, are threatened with suffocation by buildings twice or three times their height.

The Sierras are not more serrated than the cornice lines of Broadway, and the effect is not at all satisfactory to an artistic eye. Sign-boards hang out and flag-staffs rise from nearly every building. On a gala day, when all the patriotic bunting is unfolded, the view is more brilliant and ragged than ever; but what engages us most is the crowd — that uneasy mass of black dots which resemble the pen-and-ink kisses of an amorous correspondent. Has the reader ever noticed a swarm of flies buzzing on the outside of a grocer's window? That is another resemblance which the crowd has. The black dots seem to eddy, to rise and fall in constant commotion. There are hundreds of them, amid whatever their actual dress may be, they appear from a great altitude to he black, which, excepting Sunday-school festivals, is the case with all American and English crowds.

The steady progress made by each shows that the confusion is not quite hopeless, and if we fix our attention on a particular one, our interest is immediately enlisted, and we follow its course with the patient eagerness of an astronomer who devotes himself in constancy to one only of time alluring heavenly bodies. We can form no idea out of