But our great city is too great, too human, to show us much of this. Like most fecund mothers, like nature herself, her luxuriance is somewhat slatternly, her exuberance has burst its stays. Here and there our manners, our conventions, trim a hedge or two; but everywhere the forests, and even at our feet, the weeds, grow wild. Fifth Avenue, and its short purlieus, is the home of society; but elsewhere in the island of Manhattan humanity lives, unkempt, full of sap--that great humanity which has made Mrs. Gower, and which she so studiously avoids. For she lives _in_ society; and perhaps has never thought that it is on humanity she lives. Let us walk from her great house down the side street in search of it. For a block or two the houses will stand shoulder to shoulder like a well-drilled rank, well kept, well swept, and uniformed in the same non-committal, smug, respectable brown-stone, a very broadcloth of building. Then the houses begin to grow narrower, with thinner walls, though still they keep their facing on the street. Soon you pass stables, city stables; their stale, sour odor, puffing from the rarely opened windows, is very different from the sweet, healthy smells of a country farm-yard. Now the street is lined with long, low, blank-windowed warehouses, built cheaply of brick and studded with star-shaped iron clamps; you wonder what may be their use, for the windows, even when not curtained with blue paper, are impenetrable and do not avow their vocation; nor, usually, is there any sign, though the ugly walls are covered with advertisements of patent medicines, powders for making bread, powders for washing clothes, powders for feeding children, Giant Destroyers of moths, and the like. But soon this limbo is passed, and you come to the populated districts of humanity. Here the windows are no longer blank; the houses overflow with children; stout mothers sit nursing them in the doorways and gossip with their neighbors in the second story across the way; things in general are used too much, to keep their varnish from the shop. I am afraid Mrs. Gower would call it squalor.