The greatest problem of this metropolis is not how best to be in this place or that, but how fastest to go from one to the other, and the New-Yorkers have made guesses at the riddle, bad and worse, on each of the avenues, which, in their character of mere roadways, look as if the different car-tracks had been in them first, and the buildings, high and low, had chanced along their sides afterward. This is not the fact, of course, and it is not so much the effect on Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue, and Lexington Avenue, which are streets of dwellings, solidly built up, like the cross streets. But it is undoubtedly the effect on all the other avenues, in great part of their extent. They vary but little in appearance otherwise, from east to west, except so far as the elevated railroads disfigure them, if thoroughfares so shabby and repulsive as they mostly are, can be said to be disfigured, and not beautified by whatever can be done to hide any part of their ugliness. Where this is left to make its full impression upon the spectators, there are lines of horse-cars perpetually jingling up and down, except on Fifth Avenue, where they have stages, as the New-Yorkers call the unwieldy and unsightly vehicles that ply there, and Lexington Avenue, where they have the cable cars. But the horse-cars run even under the elevated tracks, and no experience of noise can enable you to conceive of the furious din that bursts upon the sense, when at some corner two cars encounter on the parallel tracks below, while two trains roar and shriek and hiss on the rails overhead, and a turmoil of rattling express wagons, heavy drays and trucks, and carts, hacks, carriages, and huge vans rolls itself between and beneath the prime agents of the uproar. The noise is not only deafening, it is bewildering; you cannot know which side the danger threatens most, and you literally take your life in your hand when you cross in the midst of it. Broadway, which traverses the district I am thinking of, in a diagonal line till it loses its distinctive character beyond the Park, is the course of the cable cars running with a silent speed that is more dangerous even than the tumultuous rush on the avenues. Now and then the apparatus for gripping the chain will not release it, and then the car rushes wildly over the track, running amuck through everything in its way, and spreading terror on every hand. When under control the long saloons advance swiftly, from either direction, at intervals of half a minute, with a monotonous alarum of their gongs, and the foot-passenger has to look well to his way if he ventures across the track, lest in avoiding one car another roll him under its wheels.