Always come back, therefore, if you must come at all, about the
beginning of November, and if you can manage to take in Election Day,
and especially Election Night, it will not be a bad notion. New York has
five saturnalia every year: New Year's Night, Decoration Day, Fourth of
July, Election Night, and Thanksgiving, and not the least of these is
Election Night. If it is a right first Tuesday of November, the daytime
wind will be veering from west to south and back, sun and cloud will
equally share the hours between them, and a not unnatural quiet, as of
political passions hushed under the blanket of the Australian ballot,
will prevail. The streets will be rather emptied than filled, and the
litter of straw and scrap-paper, and the ordure and other filth of the
great slattern town, will blow agreeably about under your feet and into
your eyes and teeth. But with the falling of the night there will be a
rise of the urban spirits; the sidewalks will thicken with citizens of
all ages and sexes and nations; and if you will then seek some large
centre for the cinematographic dissemination of the election news, you
will find yourself one of a multitude gloating on the scenes of comedy
and tragedy thrown up on the canvas to stay your impatience for the
returns. Along the curbstones are stationed wagons for the sale of the
wind and string instruments, whose raw, harsh discords of whistling and
twanging will begin with the sight of the vote from the first precinct.
Meantime policemen, nervously fondling their clubs in their hands, hang
upon the fringes of the crowd, which is yet so good-natured that it
seems to have no impulse but to lift children on its shoulders and put
pretty girls before it, and caress old women and cripples into favorable
positions, so that they may see better. You will wish to leave it before
the clubbing begins, and either go home to the slumbers which the
whistling and twanging will duly attend; or join the diners going into
or coming out of the restaurants, or the throngs strolling down into the
fairy realms of Broadway, under the flare of the whiskeys and the
actresses.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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