I stood watching her: Except for a goodbye later today with whatever excuse I invented, this was the last time I'd see her. Once I'd have thought a girl actually wearing a bustle would look foolish to me, but Julia didn't; she looked graceful, she looked absolutely fine, and I realized that the clothes of all the people passing steadily by, even the shiny silk hats, already looked natural to me.

Up ahead Julia was almost lost; there was a final flash of her purple skirt, then she was gone completely, beyond the intervening pedestrians, and I walked on.

It was a dozen blocks or so to City Hall Park, and I walked, but still I arrived much too early. A little wind had come up, and it was too cold to sit in the park and wait; I couldn't risk Pickering's seeing me waiting here anyway; I'd have to move on. But for a few moments I stood beside the little park looking across it at City Hall and at the Court House behind it, marveling at how very much they looked as I remembered them. As well as I could recall, the entire park looked just as it did in my own time, and I brought out my sketch pad, stepped into the park, and sketched it for reference: City Hall and the Court House, the paths, benches, and winter trees. I stood looking at my sketch for a moment, and it could have been done in the latter half of the twentieth century.

But now I sketched in a few hurrying pedestrians, and then some of the traffic: a carriage, a waiting hack-line of two-wheeled hansoms at the Broadway corner, an enormous green-and-yellow mail truck pulled by four horses on its way to the post office. I looked across the park at Centre Street, and stood remembering how it looked whenever it had been that I'd seen it last — how it was going to look, that is; how the traffic there now would be driven from the streets by the automobile that would follow it. And I sketched that into my scene, too: the automobiles, the enormous diesel buses, the huge trucks that were going to choke this and every other New York street; and I faced them all the same way as though they were not only following but driving the horse-drawn traffic off the scene.

I walked on; this was the business and office section of lower Broadway, the area Kate and I had been in, and I crossed the street and walked on along the west wall of the huge, absurd-looking main post office, remembering to look up at the enormous pennant reading POST OFFICE fluttering very stiffly, just now, from a cupola. Just ahead to the south on the other side of Ann Street, I noticed that everyone passing glanced into what looked like a seven-foot-high, extremely narrow sentry box with a gabled roof. It stood at the curb in front of a drugstore in the Herald Building called Hudnut's Pharmacy, and when I passed it I looked in, too. Inside it hung a tremendous thermometer, the biggest I've ever seen, sheltered in the hut from the wind. The temperature was 19 degrees, and I was pleased to know the exact temperature, a lot more interested in the weather somehow than I remembered ever being before.

Here in the daylight I was very much aware of what Kate and I hadn't seen in the dark: the incredible profusion of telegraph wires. Like a rube, I walked along for half a block staring up at a gray winter sky actually darkened, or so it seemed, by literally hundreds and hundreds of black telegraph wires on both sides of the street and running across it in bunches of sometimes several dozen, an astonishing mess. Every few yards wooden telegraph poles sprouted from the walk, some of them — I stopped and counted — with as many as fourteen crossarms loaded with wires, each pole, I noticed, marked with the name of whatever competing company had put it there.

Traffic was very heavy, rumbling and pounding along on the cobbles, and it occurred to me that this wasn't a very broad way; it was a narrow street, actually, which didn't help the congestion any. There were a great many flat-bedded or low-sided drays hauling barrels or boxes. One dray, labeled MARVINS' SAFE CO. carried a crated safe, and I could see it through the slats, brand-new, black and shiny, a freshly painted little scene — cows in a field — on the upper half of its door. As I watched, a boy ran up behind the dray, scaled the low back gate, and sat down astride it, hitching a ride. In the same block a loaded moving van rolled by, an immense red-painted box on wheels, its driver high up on a seat over the rumps of his team. On the side of the van, under the gilt-painted name BUTLER BROTHERS, MOVING, there was a large painted scene in a wildly ornate gold-painted frame. It was no pastoral scene but a cannon-flashing duel between full-rigged ships, labeled in an oval inset at the bottom THE BATTLE OF LAKE ERIE. The Broadway stages, dozens and dozens of them constantly trundling up and down the street, sometimes three or four in a row, were very much like the Fifth Avenue buses only they were painted red, white, and blue, and they had scenes, too, painted on the sides; mostly pastoral, and pretty much daubs. But they were all different, and I liked this whole idea of scenic decoration of ordinary things. The twentieth century's diesel monsters, I decided, would be improved by some of the same.

There were a great many light, single-horse delivery wagons, and in among the commercial traffic an occasional fine carriage moving uptown, toward the Ladies' Mile, I supposed. And everywhere I looked, there were signs, the names of firms occupying the buildings on which the signs hung. Most were black letters on white, or gold letters on black, and they hung out over the sidewalks or were wired to building ledges just below rows of windows, slanting slightly downward so they could be read from the street.

I liked the street; it was varied, interesting to the eye. The entrances to some of the buildings were four or five steps above street level, the wide flights of stairs often separated by a brass railing into incoming and outgoing sections. Generally there'd be more offices or a barbershop or restaurant or something in the basement section, half below street level, the stairway down to it protected by black iron guard railings with a row of points along the street-level railing to keep loafers from sitting on them. The buildings were constructed from every possible material; there was plenty of brick and wood; there were some whose entire fronts were of cast iron, often as high as three or four stories; there were marble and granite, brownstone, wood, and even stucco. And they were of mixed periods; between newer four- and five-story stone office buildings I passed a lot of small, modest houses of an obviously earlier time, with old-fashioned dormer windows in the upper stories, but the lower stories turned into shops with plate-glass display windows. At one such display window eight or ten men were standing, and I joined them. A girl, looking very prim and a little embarrassed, and never glancing at us, sat demonstrating a typewriter. It was a strange-looking contraption, high and almost completely open, exposing its works, and decorated here and there with gilt-and-red arabesques. Stuck to the window with little dabs of paste were samples of her work, praising the machine, its speed, and its superiority to handwriting. We all watched till she finished what she was doing, a short, sample business letter. Then she stuck that to the window and began a new sample. A man beside me said, "They'll be all the go soon; you watch." But I shook my head and said, "No, they'll never catch on; they lack the personal touch," and he looked thoughtful.

I turned away from the window; the walks were crowded, mostly with men. Were there far more portly and even fat men now than you'd see in the late twentieth century? I thought so. Dozens of boys — why weren't they in school? — darted through the crowd in messenger uniforms, the day's equivalent of the telephone, I supposed. There were occasional other boys, not much older, carrying canvas sacks of what seemed to be actual money; I heard the clink of coins inside them. And there were younger boys, some no more than six or seven, often literally in rags, their faces and hands permanently dirty. Some of these were selling papers. I saw all the morning papers — the Herald, Times, Tribune, Sun, World — and the first afternoon editions of a lot of the others: the Daily Graphic, Staats Zeitung, Telegram, Express, Post, Brooklyn Times, Brooklyn Eagle, and still others I can't remember. Every one of them carried column headings about the Guiteau verdict, and I heard Guiteau's name mentioned often by passersby. Others of the smaller boys shined shoes and boots from portable stands carried by straps slung over their shoulders. These were the boys, it suddenly occurred to me, that Horatio Alger wrote about; he was alive now, I recalled, maybe writing Tom, the Bootblack at this moment. But the bright, eager, cheerful faces he wrote about weren't down here. These faces, even the six-year-olds', were intent and knowing, shrewd and alert, as they had to be — I thought I could see this in their faces — if they were to eat tonight. Several men suddenly stopped on the walk, stepped to the curb, pulled out their watches and then stood, heads thrown back, staring up and across the street, watches still in hand. Even while I was wondering about it, more men stepped to the curb, dragging watches from their vest pockets. And within less than a minute hundreds of men lined the curb of Broadway for blocks, glancing from the open watches in their hands to the roof of one of the tallest buildings along here.