The New York to which Barnum emigrated late in the winter of 1834 is a New York with which we must become acquainted. Its population was slightly more than 200,000, and Mrs. Martha J. Lamb in her _History of the City of New York_ deplored the overcrowding: “New York City by this time appeared like a youth much overgrown for his years. It had shot up with a rapidity that defied calculation. Wealth was increasing faster than sobriety was inclined to measure. Swarming multitudes from every quarter of the globe were rendering the community in a certain sense unformed.” In contrast to this picture of wild growth we can record that stage coaches were the only means of public conveyance, and the newfangled horse car was forcing its clattering way up one street on a single-tracked line, in spite of the opposition of the large majority, who preferred their safe and sure stage coaches. Broadway, according to Charles Dickens, who visited New York a few years after Barnum became a resident, was “a wide and bustling street, which, from the Battery Gardens to its opposite termination in a country road, may be four miles long,” and in Mrs. Lamb’s opinion “Washington Square was quite a long distance from the city.” The number of omnibuses surprised Dickens--“half-a-dozen have gone by within as many minutes”--and he was also impressed by the large-wheeled tilburies, the gigs, the phaetons, and the hackney coaches, by which the upper classes were carried about the city. But when Dickens crossed the wide and bustling street called Broadway, he found it necessary to look out for the pigs, who trotted clumsily behind the carriages and acted as the city scavengers.