Here come that de-socialized class, the New York business men, with their hands thrust moodily into their coat pockets, their eyes buttoned fixedly down to the sidewalk, and “the almighty dollar” written legibly all over them. If the automatons would but show _some_ sign of life; were it only by a whistle. I’m very sure the tune would be “I know a--_Bank!_” See that pretty little couple yonder, crouched upon the sidewalk? What have you there, little ones? Five little, fat, roly-poly puppies, as I live, all heads and tails, curled up in that comical old basket! And you expect to get “a dollar apiece” for them? Bless your dear little souls, Broadway is full of “puppies,” who never “bring” anything but odious cigar smoke, that ever I could find out. Puppies are at a discount, my darlings. Peanuts are a safer investment. Here we are at Trinity Church. I doubt if human lips within those walls ever preached as eloquently as those century grave-stones. How the sight of them involuntarily arrests the bounding footstep, and the half-developed plan of the scheming brain, and wakes up the slumbering immortal in our nature. How the eye turns a questioning glance from those moss-grown graves, inward--then upward to the soft, blue heavens above us. How for a brief moment the callous heart grows kindly, and we forget the mote in our brothers eye, and cease to repulse the outspread palm of charity, and recognise the claims of a common brotherhood; and then how the sweeping tide comes rolling over us, and the clink of dollars and cents drowns “the still small voice,” and Eternity recedes, and Earth only seems tangible, and Mammon, and Avarice, and Folly rule the never returning hours. Now glance over the church-yard yonder into the street below. Cholera and pestilence, what a sight! flanked on one side by the charnel-house, on the other by houses whose basements are groggeries and markets, and at whose every pane of glass may be seen a score of dirty faces: the middle of the street a quagmire of jelly-mud, four inches deep, on which are strewn, ad-infinitum, decayed potatoes and cabbage stumps, old bones and bonnets, mouldy bread, salt fish and dead kittens. That pussy-cat New York corporation should be put on a diet of peppered thunder and gunpowder tea, and harnessed to a comet for six months. I doubt if even then the old poppies would wake up. Do you see that piece of antiquity playing the bagpipe? He is as much a fixture as your country cousin. There he sits, through heat and cold, squeezing out those horrible sounds with his skinny elbow, and keeping time with his nervous eye-winkers. He gets up his own programme, and is his own orchestra, door-keeper and audience: nobody stops to listen, nobody fees him, nobody seems to enjoy it so hugely as himself.