And so it was that not before 1904--ten years later, really--that I was so much as troubled to sketch a single impression of all that I had seen and then only at the request of a Sunday editor of a New York newspaper who was short of “small local stuff” to fill in between his more lurid features. And even at that, not more than seven or eight of all that are here assembled were at that time even roughly sketched,--_The Bowery Mission_, _The Waterfront_, _The Cradle of Tears_, _The Track Walker_, _The Realization of an Ideal_, _The Log of a Harbor Pilot_. Later, however, in 1908 and ’09, finding space in a magazine of my own--_The Bohemian_--as well as one conducted by Senator Watson of Georgia, and bethinking me of all I had seen and how truly wonderful and colorful it really was, I began to try to do more of them, and at that time wrote at least seven or eight more--_The Flight of Pigeons_, _Six O’clock_, _The Wonder of Water_, _The Men in the Storm_, and _The Men in the Dark_. The exact titles of all, apart from these, I have forgotten. Still later, after the opening of the World War, and because I was noting how swiftly and steadily the city was changing and old landmarks and conditions were being done away with, I thought it worth while to bring together, not only all the scenes I had previously published or sketched, but to add some others which from time to time I had begun but never finished. Among these at that time were _The Fire_, _Hell’s Kitchen_, _A Wayplace of the Fallen_, _The Man on the Bench_. And then, several years ago, having in the meanwhile once more laid aside the material to the advantage of other matters, I decided that it was still worth while. And getting them all out and casting aside those I no longer cared for, and rewriting others of which I approved, together with new pictures of old things I had seen, i.e., _Bums_, _The Michael J. Powers Association_, _A Vanished Summer Resort_, _The Push-cart Man_, _The Sandwich Man_, _Characters_, _The Men in the Snow_, _The City Awakes_--I finally evolved the present volume. But throughout all these latest additions I sought only to recapture the flavor and the color of that older day--nothing more. If they are anything, they are mere representations of the moods that governed me at the time that I had observed this material at first hand--not as I know the city to be now. In certain of these pictures, as will be seen, reference is made to wages, hours and working and living conditions not now holding, or at least not to the same severe degree. This is especially true of such presentations as _The Men in the Dark_, _The Men in the Storm_, _The Men in the Snow_, _Six O’clock_, _The Bread-line_, (long since abolished), _The Toilers of the Tenements_, and _Christmas in the Tenements_. Yet since they were decidedly true of that particular period, I prefer to leave them as originally written. They bear, I believe, the stamp of their hour.