Delmonico’s was on Twenty-sixth Street. It was one of those landmarks that always kept pace with the trend of the times. I can remember only one very distinctive restaurant at that time; it was named the Au Petit Vefour and was run by Henri, who used to cook for the Stomach Club in Washington Square. Like all French places, it was not particularly smart, but the table and service were always immaculate. Henri went down to the markets every morning at six o’clock, digging down to the bottom of the boxes of fruit and vegetables, and feeling of the chickens until he managed to bring home the raw material which he and madame between them prepared in a style fit for a king. Calories, vitamines, etc., had not become popular, and I do not believe Henri ever heard of them, but he could serve, by instinct, a balanced ration accompanied by the proper wine. When you got through, however, it cost as much as Delmonico’s. It is hard to picture New York without subways, and to think of the tired workingman reaching his home after a hard day’s work by the aid of a lumbering horse car. It seems almost incredible that so many changes have taken place in thirty years. The horses of the Fifth Avenue buses were the butt of many a joke in _Life_. One crossed by ferry to Brooklyn, and the city was just beginning to dig the trench on Broadway for the cable car, announcing with a loud voice that it was the first cable in America. It did no good to tell them that I rode on one in San Francisco in the ’seventies. Of course, there were no traffic laws, as these are quite recent, and this made the streets seem more crowded than they are to-day and therefore harder to cross. There were one or two policemen at the most prominent corners, but these seemed to have been chosen for their great physical beauty rather than to aid traffic; vehicles could go right, left, or backward if they desired. The Tenderloin (which word originated from the remark of a police captain that he would take it as his beat—“the best part of the animal” from the point of view of graft) was in one section. Due to some misdirected effort it is now scattered over the city. The days of Chicago May are gone—she with golden hair, pale-blue eyes, looking fourteen, but really twenty-five—dear, pathetic creature for whom everyone was sorry. No longer does she beg the unsuspecting clubman to “take her home and let her warm herself for a while by his fire,” only to bawl him out in the vilest language if he did not recognize her when, dressed in his “long and high,” he dallied up Fifth Avenue, making Sunday calls. These days are gone, yes, but is it any better, I wonder, to have a gambling den, a blind pig, or a house of prostitution tucked safely away behind the portals of one’s most respectable apartment house?