It chills my blood to hear the Blest Supreme

Rudely appealed to on each trifling theme.

Maintain your rank, vulgarity despise;

To swear is neither brave, polite, nor wise.

You would not swear on a bed of death;

Reflect! Your Maker now may stop your breath.

Apparently I was the only one in the place who read it; no one else, including the bartender, gave a goddam for its sentiment, judging from their speech, and I think it was up there solely for its anti-WCTU propaganda value.

There was a New York City Directory lying at the end of the bar, and I pulled it over: Who was alive in New York City just now? Well, for one, I remembered from a college class in American Literature, there was Edith Wharton; she'd be a young girl of nineteen or twenty now, still unmarried, her family name Jones, observing the New York society she'd eventually write about. But there were four pages of Joneses, of course, and if I ever knew her father's first name, which I doubt, I didn't remember it now. Franklin Roosevelt, I knew, was born in 1882, or at least I thought so. But not in January, and not in New York City, but I looked up «Roosevelt» anyway, and found a dozen or so, including an Elliott and a James. Al Smith, an old-time politician my father used to rant about, was a boy somewhere on the lower East Side now, but I didn't bother looking up "Smith." I found Ulysses S. Grant, listed as living at 3 East 66th Street. Walt Whitman wasn't listed; did he live in Brooklyn? I couldn't remember. But General Custer's wife, Elizabeth B., was listed as «widow» and living at 148 East 18th Street — the Stuyvesant apartment building, maybe?

I finished my lunch, and was turning to leave when I remembered one more name, and I looked it up. It was there, all right: "Melville, Herman, inspector, h. 104 E. 26th." I walked on up to Twenty-sixth, and found 104 between Fourth and Lexington, on the south side of the street. It was a house, old and even now old-fashioned-looking. I hung around outside it for a few minutes, walking slowly up and down Twenty-sixth Street. I knew he was undoubtedly at work, somewhere in a customs shed along the river, and I didn't really know what he looked like anyway. I just had an idea that if he came along I'd somehow know him, and I'd tell him that I liked Moby Dick very much, which would have been an exaggeration though not entirely. This was sheer foolishness, and after a turn or two in front of the house, I left. I thought of taking a shot of the house, but it was nondescript, uninteresting, and I didn't have much film left; I'd have liked a picture of the man, though.

At Thirty-fifth and Fifth a bus just like the one Kate and I had ridden was approaching, and I had to take this shot of it; especially since I also got the A.T. Stewart mansion (there at the right) and the twin Astor houses off to the left. This is where the Empire State Building was to go up later. It's a pretty typical view of Fifth Avenue; the wrought-iron railings there in the lower left corner all guard the stairways to the basement levels of a row of New York brownstones absolutely identical to similar rows that survive unchanged in the latter half of the twentieth century.

A thought broke the surface of my mind like a log breaking loose from the bottom of a lake, and floating slowly up to the top: Julia. Well, what about her? I walked north on Fifth; it was almost warm out now, a lot of blue sky showing through the gray. There was no problem about Julia; I'd settled that in my mind last night, and it was a decision I wasn't going to change. Yet a feeling of nameless worry persisted.

I'd used over half my film but when I reached Forty-second Street I had to have a photo of the Croton Reservoir. There was a set of rust flecked iron rungs set into the stone wall at the corner of Fifth and Forty-second, and while I doubted that it was allowed, I climbed to the top; after the bridge it was nothing. Up on top, standing at the corner looking south, I took the shot below; the reservoir there on the right, more brownstones on the left, exactly like those I mentioned, further south. I think this view gives an even better idea of how narrow Fifth is. Was. Notice the sidewalks; they're of cut stone, not concrete.

For a dozen seconds I stood there on the Croton Reservoir staring down at the carriage stopped at the curb in the lower left of the photo I'd just taken, but I wasn't really looking at it. There was something I was neglecting, and it was about Julia. But nothing happened in my mind, and when a woman came out of the house — the mansion, really — to enter the waiting carriage below me, the liveried driver hopping down to open the door for her, I sighed, slung my camera over my shoulder, and climbed carefully down.

At Forty-fourth Street I took this. I feel certain that Ye Olde Willow Cottage was a relic of colonial times. Inside Tyson's, entire carcasses were hanging, though in too much shadow to show on my film.

In the fashionable Fifties the crowds were heavier, but I got a shot of William K. Vanderbilt's mansion — that's it in the center, looking brand-new, and built of dazzling white limestone.

I walked clear up to the Seventies, alongside Central Park, before turning back; I was in the area of small truck farms again, still largely unbuilt upon, and I knew from yesterday's sleigh ride that there was nothing much ahead but more and more open country.

For variety on the way back, I walked over a block to Madison Avenue, turned south to walk back, and at Seventy-first Street I stopped and took the following, once again because — I'm not sure why this interested me so — I felt sure the farmhouse was a colonial relic still in use on Manhattan Island. That's the Museum of Natural History off there across Central Park, very clearly visible from here at the corner of Seventy-first Street and Madison Avenue of a strangely rural New York City.

I had one plate left, and I used it down in the Forties, back in the built-up city again, and, for me anyway, it's the best of all. Madison was a far quieter street than Fifth, but like Fifth it had been promptly cleared of yesterday's snow, and every single stoop and inch of sidewalk — all these houses had servants, I'm certain — was long since shoveled and swept clean.

It was so quiet I could hear my own footsteps, and in the afternoon warmth of this brief late January thaw, feeling the clear sunny air on my face — the sky almost entirely blue now — I strolled along that peaceful, residential long-ago Madison Avenue momentarily as happy as I've ever been. At Forty-first Street a set of stone pillars flanking the stairs to a brownstone was flat on the tops, and I set Felix's camera on one of them. Taking my time then, focusing carefully, I took a picture that for me captures the quality I've tried to describe, of peace and tranquillity and better times. Here it is: Forty-first Street and Madison Avenue, an utterly different place and world in the latter twentieth century. But I like it this way. I took my picture and walked on, and I can still hear the clip-clop behind me of the horse-drawn car you can see in the middle distance, and the footsteps on that cut-stone walk of the long-skirted woman under the umbrella a block away. In those moments, the moments of this picture, I was in the one place in all the world that I wanted to be.