As I have said before, the shabby avenues have a picturesqueness of their own, but it is a repulsive picturesqueness, as I have already suggested, except at a distance. There are some differences of level, on the avenues near the rivers, that give them an advantage of the more central avenues, and there is now and then a break of their line by the water, which is always good. I have noticed this particularly on the eastern side of the city, which is also the older part, and which has been less subject to the changes perpetually going on elsewhere, so that First Avenue has really a finer sky-line, in many parts, than most parts of Fifth Avenue. There are certain bits, as the artists say, in the old quarters of the town once forming Greenwich village, which, when I think of them, make me almost wish to take back what I have said of the absence even of quaintness in New York. If I recall the aspect of Mulberry Bend and Elizabeth street, on a mild afternoon, when their Italian denizens are all either on the pavement or have their heads poked out of the windows, I am still more in doubt of my own words. But I am sure, at least, that there is no kindliness in the quaintness, such as you are said to find in European cities. It has undergone the same sort of malign change here that has transformed the Italians from the friendly folk they are at home to the surly race they mostly show themselves here: shrewd for their advancement in the material things, which seem the only good things to the Americanized aliens of all races, and fierce for their full share of the political pottage. The Italians have a whole region of the city to themselves, and they might feel at home in it if the filthiness of their native environment could repatriate them. As you pass through these streets, there is much to appeal to your pity in the squalid aspect of the people and the place, but nothing to take your fancy; and perhaps this is best, for I think that there is nothing more infernal than the juggle that transmutes for the tenderest-hearted people the misery of their fellows into something comic or poetic. Only very rarely have I got any relief from the sheer distress which the prevalent poverty gives; and perhaps the reader will not be able to understand how I could find this in the sight of some chickens going to roost on a row of carts drawn up by the street-side, near a little hovel where some old people lived in a temporary respite from the building about them; or from a cottage in outlying suburban fields, with a tar-roofed shanty for a stable, and an old horse cropping the pasturage of the enclosure, with a brood of turkeys at his heels.