[Illustration: It is also better walking up here.] Then come those that walk at the convenience of dogs, attractive or kickable, and a little later the close-ranked boarding-school squads and the cohorts of nurse-maids with baby-carriages four abreast, charging everyone off the sidewalk. Next come the mothers of the babies and their aunts, setting out for shopping, unless they have gone to ride in the Park, and for Guild Meetings and Reading Clubs and Political Economy Classes and Heaven knows what other important morning engagements, ending, perhaps, with a visit to the nerve-specialist. And so on throughout the morning and afternoon and evening hours, each with its characteristic phase, until the last late theatre-party has gone home, laughing and talking, from supper at Sherry's or the Waldorf-Astoria; the last late bachelor has left the now quiet club; the rapping of his cane along the silent avenue dies away down an echoing side-street; and a lonely policeman nods in the shadow of the church gate-post. Suddenly the earliest milk-wagon comes jangling up from the ferry; then dawn comes up over the gas-houses along East River and it all begins over again. [Illustration: ... those who walk for the sake of walking.] But the most popular and populous time of all is the regular walking-home hour, not only for those who have spent the day down toward the end of the island at work, but for those who have no more serious business to look after than wandering from club to club drinking cocktails, or from house to house drinking tea. All who take the walk regularly meet many of the same ones every day, not only acquaintances, but others whom we somehow never see in any other place, but learn to know quite well, and we wonder who they are--and they wonder who we are, I suppose. Pairs of pink-faced old gentlemen, walking arm-in-arm and talking vigorously. Contented young couples who look at the old furniture in the antique-shop windows and who are evidently married, and other younger couples who evidently soon will be, and see nothing, not even their friends. Intent-browed young business men with newspapers under their arms; governesses out with their charges; bevies of fluffy girls with woodcock eyes, especially on matinée day with programmes in their hands, talking gushingly. [Illustration: At the lower corner of the Waldorf-Astoria.] It is a sort of a club, this walking-up-the-avenue crowd; and each member grows to expect certain other members at particular points in the walk, and is rather disappointed when, for instance, the old gentleman with the large nose is not with his daughter this evening. "What can be the matter?" the rest of us ask each other, seeing her alone.