In New York the elevated trains thundering over your head and darkening the street, surface electric cars beneath them being run at lightning speed, the street paved with cobblestones over which delivery carts are being driven at a pace which is cruelty to animals, form a combination of noises compared to which a battery of artillery in action is a lullaby, and which I defy any other city in the world to equal. A hen crossing a country lane in front of a carriage, squawking and wild-eyed, is a picture of my state of mind whenever I have a street to cross. Yesterday there were two street-car accidents and one runaway, which I saw with my own eyes in an hour's outing, and I had no sooner locked myself in my sixth-floor apartment with a sigh of relief at being saved from sudden death when a crash came in the street below, and by hanging out of the window I saw that an electric car had struck a plate-glass delivery wagon in the rear, upset it, smashed the glass, thrown the horse on his side, and so pushed them, horse, cart, and all, for a quarter of a block before the car could be stopped. I shrieked loud and long, but in the noise of the city no one heard me, and all the good it did was to ease my own mind. New York is a good place to come to, to be amused, or to spend money, but as a city of terrific and unnecessary noises, there is not one in the world which can compare to it. Scissors-grinders are allowed to use a bugle--a bugle, mind you, well known to be the most far-reaching sound of all sounds, and intended to carry over the roar of even artillery, else why is it used in a battle? So this bugling begins about seven in the morning, and penetrates the most hermetically sealed apartments. Then the street-cleaners, the "White Wings," garbage and ash-can men begin their deadly rounds, and the clang of dashing empty metal cans on the stone-paved courts and areas reverberates between high buildings until one longs for the silence of the grave. The noise and shock of blasting rock is incessant. They are blasting all along the Hudson shore and in Central Park. It sounds like cannonading, and the succession of explosions sometimes wakens one before dawn or after midnight with the frightened conviction that a foreign fleet is upon us to force us to reduce the tariff. The blasting occasionally goes a little too far, and breaks windows or brings down pieces of the ceiling. Last week it caved in a house and broke some arms and legs of the occupants. One woman went into convulsions, and was rigid for hours from the shock, but as nobody was killed no action was taken. Old clothes men are permitted a string of bells on their carts, which all jangle out of tune and at once, while street-cries of all descriptions abound in such numbers and of such a quality that I often wonder that the very babies trundled by in their perambulators do not go into spasms with the confusion of it.