It is two short blocks from my office near Park Row to the Subway station where I take the express for Belshazzar Court. Eight months in the year it is my endeavor to traverse this distance as quickly as I can. This is done by cutting diagonally across the street traffic. By virtue of the law governing rightangled triangles I thus save as much as fifty feet and one fifth of a minute of time. In the course of a year this saving amounts to sixty minutes, which may be profitably spent over a tworeel presentation of 'The Moonshiner's Bride,' supplemented by an intimate picture of Lumbering in Saskatchewan. But with the coming of warm weather my habits change. It grows more difficult to plunge into the murk of the Subway.

A foretaste of the languor of June is in the air. The turnstile storm-doors in our office building, which have been put aside for brief periods during the first deceptive approaches of spring, only to come back triumphant from Elba, have been definitively removed. The steel-workers pace their girders twenty floors high almost in mid-season form, and their pneumatic hammers scold and chatter through the sultry hours. The soda-fountains are bright with new compounds whose names ingeniously reflect the world's progress from day to day in politics, science, and the arts. From my window I can see the long black steamships pushing down to the sea, and they raise vague speculations in my mind about the cost of living in the vicinity of Sorrento and Fontaine

bleau. On such a day I am reminded of my physician's orders, issued last December, to walk a mile every afternoon on leaving my office. So I stroll up Broadway with the intention of taking my train farther up-town, at Fourteenth Street.

The doctor did not say stroll. He said a brisk walk with head erect, chest thrown out, diaphragm well contracted, and a general aspect of money in the bank. But here enters human perversity. The only place where I am in the mood to walk after the prescribed military fashion is in the open country. Just where by all accounts I ought to be sauntering without heed to time, studying the lovely texts which Nature has set down in the modest typeforms selected from her inexhaustible fonts,-in the minion of ripening berries, in the nonpareil of crawling insect life, the agate of tendril and filament, and the 12-point diamond of the dust,

there I stride along and see little. And in the city, where I should swing along briskly, I lounge. What is there on Broadway to linger over? On Broadway, Nature has used her biggest, fattest type-forms. Tall, flat, building fronts, brazen with many windows and ribbed with commercial gilt lettering six feet high; shrieking proclamations of auction sales written in letters of fire on vast canvasses; railway posters in scarlet and blue and green; rotatory barber-poles striving at the national colors and producing vertigo; banners, escutcheons, crests, in all the primary colors - surely none of these things

needs poring over. And I know them with my eyes closed. I know the windows where lithe youths in gymnasium dress demonstrate the virtue of home exercises; the windows where other young men do nothing but put on and take off patent reversible near-linen collars; where young women deftly roll cigarettes; where other young women whittle at sticks with miraculously stropped razors. I know these things by heart, yet I linger over them in flagrantly unhygienic attitudes, my shoulders bent forward and my chest and diaphragm in a position precisely the reverse of that prescribed by the doctor.

Perhaps the thing that makes me linger before these familiar sights is the odd circumstance that in Broadway's shop-windows Nature is almost never herself, but is either supernatural or artificial. Nature, for instance, never intended that razors should cut wood and remain sharp; that linen collars should keep on getting cleaner the longer they are worn; that glass should not break; that ink should not stain; that gauze should not tear; that an object worth five dollars should sell for $1.39; but all these things happen in Broadway windows. Williams, whom I meet now and then, who sometimes turns and walks up with me to Fourteenth Street, pointed out to me the other day how strange a thing it was that the one street which has become a synonym for 'real life' to all good suburban Americans is not real at all, but is crowded either with miracles or with imitations.

The windows on Broadway glow with wax fruits and with flowers of muslin and taffeta drawn by bounteous Nature from her storehouses in Parisian garret workshops. Broadway's ostrich feathers have been plucked in East Side tenements. The huge cigars in the tobacconist's windows are of wood. The enormous bottles of champagne

in the saloons are of cardboard, and empty. The tall scaffoldings of proprietary medicine bottles in the drug shops are of paper. 'Why,' said Williams, even the jewelry sold in the Japanese auction stores is not genuine, and the sellers are not Japanese.'

This bustling mart of commerce, as the generation after the Civil War used to say, is only a world of illusion. Artificial flowers, artificial fruits, artificial limbs, tobacco, rubber, silks, woolens, straws, gold, silver. The young men and women who manipulate razors and elastic cords are real, but not always. Williams and I once stood for a long while and gazed at a young woman posing in a drug-shop window, and argued whether she was alive. Ultimately she winked and Williams gloated over me. But how do I know her wink was real? At any rate the great mass of human life in the windows is artificial. The ladies who smile out of charming morning costumes are obviously of lining and plaster. Their smug Herculean husbands in pajamas preserve their equanimity in the severest winter weather only because of their wireand-plaster constitution. The baby reposing in its beribboned crib is china and excelsior. Illusion everywhere.

But the Broadway crowd is real. You only have to buffet it for five minutes to feel, in eyes and arms and shoulders, how real it is. When I was a boy and was taken to the circus it was always an amazing thing to me that there should be so many people in the street moving in a direction away from the circus. Something of this sensation still besets me whenever we go down in the Subway from Belshazzar Court to hear Caruso. The presence of all the other people on our train is simple enough. They are all on their way to hear Caruso. But what of the crowds in the trains that flash by in the opposite direction? It is not a question of feel

ing sorry for them. I try to understand and I fail. But on Broadway on a late summer afternoon the obverse is true. The natural thing is that the living tide as it presses south shall beat me back, halt me, eddy around me. I know that there are people moving north with me, but I am not acutely aware of them. This onrush of faces converges on me alone. It is I against half the world.

And then suddenly out of the surge of faces one leaps out at me. It is Williams, whose doctor has told him that the surest way of fighting down the lust for tobacco is to walk down from his office to the ferry every afternoon. Williams and I salute each other after the fashion of Broadway, which is to exchange greetings backward over the shoulder. This is the first step in an elaborate minuet. Because we have passed each other before recognition came, our hands fly out backward. Now we whirl half around, so that I who have been moving north face the west, while Williams, who has been traveling south, now looks east. Our clasped hands strain at each other as we stand there poised for flight after the first greeting. A quarter of a minute perhaps, and we have said good-bye.

But if the critical quarter of a minute passes, there ensues a change of geographical position which corresponds to a change of soul within us. I suddenly say to myself that there are plenty of trains to be had at Fourteenth Street. Williams recalls that another boat will leave Battery Place shortly after the one he is bound for. So the tension of our outstretched arms relaxes. I, who have been facing west, complete the half circle and swing south. Williams veers due north, and we two men stand face to face. The beat and clamor of the crowd fall away from us like a well-trained stage mob. We are in Broadway, but not of it.

'Well, what's the good word?' says Williams.

When two men meet on Broadway the spirit of optimism strikes fire. We begin by asking each other what the good word is. We take it for granted that neither of us has anything but a chronicle of victory and courage to relate. What other word but the good word is tolerable in the lexicon of living, upstanding men? Failure is only for the dead. Surrender is for the man with yellow in his nature. So Williams and I pay our acknowledgments to this best of possible worlds. I give Williams the good word. I make no allusion to the fact that I have spent a miserable night in communion with neuralgia; how can that possibly concern him? Another manuscript came back this morning from an editor who regretted that his is the most unintelligent body of readers in the country. The third cook in three weeks left us last night after making vigorous reflections on my wife's good nature and my own appearance. Only an hour ago, as I was watching the long, black steamers bound for Sorrento and Fontainebleau, the monotony of one's treadmill work, the flat unprofitableness of scribbling endlessly on sheets of paper, had become almost a nausea. But Williams will know nothing of this from me. Why should he? He may have been sitting up all night with a sick child. At this very moment the thought of the little parched lips, the moan, the unseeing eyes, may be tearing at his entrails; but he in turn gives me the good word, and many others after that, and we pass on.

But sometimes I doubt. This splendid optimism of people on Broadway, in the Subway and in the shops and offices

is it really a sign of high spiritual courage, or is it just lack of sensibility? Do we find it easy to keep a stiff upper lip, to buck up, to never say die, because we are brave men, or simply

because we lack the sensitiveness and the imagination to react to pain? It may be even worse than that. It may be part of our commercial gift for window-dressing, for putting up a good front.

Sometimes I feel that Williams has no right to be walking down Broadway on business when there is a stricken child at home. The world cannot possibly need him at that moment as much as his own flesh and blood does. It is not courage; it is brutish indifference. At such times I am tempted to dismiss as mythical all this fine talk about feelings that run deep beneath the surface, and bruised hearts that ache under the smile. If a man really suffers he will show it. If a man cultivates the habit of not showing emotion he will end by having none to show. How much of Broadway's optimism is - But here I am paraphrasing William James's Principles of Psychology, which the reader can just as well consult for himself in the latest revised edition of 1907.

Also, I am exaggerating. Most likely Williams's children are all in perfect health, and my envelope from the editor has brought a check instead of a rejection slip. It is on such occasions that Williams and I, after shaking hands the way a locomotive takes on water on the run, wheel around, halt, and proceed to buy something at the rate of two for a quarter. If any one is ever inclined to doubt the spirit of American fraternity, it is only necessary to recall the number of commodities for men that sell two for twenty-five cents. In theory, the two cigars which Williams and I buy for twenty-five cents are worth fifteen cents apiece. As a matter of fact they are probably ten-cent cigars. But the shopkeeper is welcome to his extra nickel. It is a small price to pay for the seal of comradeship that stamps his pair of cigars

selling for a single quarter. Two men who have concluded a business deal in which each has commendably tried to get the better of the other may call for twenty-five cent perfectos or for half-dollar Dreadnoughts. I understand there are such. But friends sitting down together will always demand cigars that go for a round sum, two for a quarter or three for fifty (if the editor's check is what it ought to be).

When people speak of the want of real comradeship among women, I sometimes wonder if one of the reasons may not be that the prices which women are accustomed to pay are individualistic instead of fraternal. The soda fountains and the street cars do not dispense goods at the rate of two items for a single coin. It is infinitely worse in the department stores. Treating a friend to something that costs $2.79 is inconceivable. But I have really wandered from my point.

'Well, be good,' says Williams, and rushes off to catch his boat.

The point I wish to make is that on Broadway people pay tribute to the principle of goodness that rules this world, both in the way they greet and in the way they part. We salute by asking each other what the good word is. When we say good-bye we enjoin each other to be good. The humorous assumption is that gay devils like Williams and me need to be constantly warned against straying off into the primrose paths that run out of Broad

way.

Simple, humorous, average American man! You have left your suburban couch in time to walk half a mile to the station and catch the 7.59 for the city. You have read your morning paper; discussed the weather, the tariff, and the prospects for lettuce with your neighbor; and made the office only a minute late. You have