By the time Sixth Avenue is crossed brick frequently come into use in place of brownstone, and there are not only doctors' signs now, but "Robes et Manteaux" are announced, or sometimes, as on that ugly iron balcony, merely Madame somebody. By this time also there have already appeared on some of the newel-posts by the door-bell, "Boarders," or "Furnished Rooms"--modestly written on a mere slip of paper, as though it had been deemed unnecessary to shout the words out for the neighborhood to hear. In there, back of these lace-curtains, yellow, though not with age, is the parlor--the boarding-house parlor--with tidies which always come off and small gilt chairs which generally break, and wax wreaths under glass, like cheeses under fly-screens in country groceries. In the place of honor hangs the crayon portrait of the dear deceased, in an ornate frame. But most of the boarders never go there, except to pay their bills; down in the basement dining-room is where they congregate, you can see them now through the grated window, at the tables. Here, on the corner, is the little tailor-shop or laundry, which is usually found in the low building back of that facing the avenue, which latter is always a saloon unless it is a drug-store; on the opposite corner is still another saloon--rivals very likely in the Tammany district as well as in business, with a policy-shop or a pool-room on the floor above, as all the neighbors know, though the local good government club cannot stop it. Here is the "family entrance" which no family ever enters. [Illustration: Chinatown.] Then come more apartments and more private residences, not invariably _passé_, more boarding-houses, many, many boarding-houses, theatrical boarding-houses, students' boarding-houses, foreign boarding-houses; more small business places, and so on across various mongrel avenues until here is the region of warehouses and piano factories and finally even railway tracks with large astonishing trains of cars. Cross these tracks and you are beyond the city, in the suburbs, as much as the lateral edges of this city can have suburbs; yet this is only the distance of a long golf-hole from residences and urbanity. Here are stock-yards with squealing pigs, awful smells, deep, black mire, and then a long dock reaching far out into the Hudson, with lazy river barges flopping along-side it, and dock-rats fishing off the end--a hot, hateful walk if ever your business or pleasure calls you out there of a summer afternoon. There the typical up-town cross street ends its dreary existence. II Down-town it is so different.