One of the most appealing and interesting elements in city life, particularly that metropolitan city life which characterizes New York, is the pushcart man. This curious creature of modest intellect and varying nationality infests all the highways of the great city without actually dominating any of them except a few streets on the East Side. He is as hard-working, in the main, as he is ubiquitous. His cart is so shabby, his stock in trade so small. If he actually earns a reasonable wage it is by dint of great energy and mere luck, for the officers of the law in apparently every community find in the presence of this person an alluring source of profit and he is picked and grafted upon as is perhaps no other member of the commonplace brotherhood of trade. I like to see them trundling their two-wheeled vehicles about the city, and I like to watch the patience and the care with which they exercise their barely tolerated profession of selling. You see them everywhere; vendors of fruit, vegetables, chestnuts on the East Side, selling even dry goods, hardware, furs and groceries; and elsewhere again the Greeks selling neckwear, flowers and curios, the latter things at which an ordinary man would look askance, but which the lower levels of society somehow find useful. I have seen them tramping in long files across Williamsburg Bridge at one, two and three o’clock in the morning to the Wallabout Market in Brooklyn. And I have seen them clambering over hucksters’ wagons there and elsewhere searching for the choicest bits, which they hope to sell quickly. The market men have small consideration for them and will as lief strike or kick at them as to reach a bargain with them. For one thing, I remember watching an old pushcart vendor one sweltering afternoon in summer from one o’clock in the afternoon to seven the same evening, and I was never more impressed with the qualities which make for success in this world, qualities which are rare in American life, or in any life, for that matter, for patience and good nature and sturdy charitable endurance are not common qualities anywhere. He had his stand at Sixth Avenue and Twenty-third Street, New York, then the center of the shopping life of the city--or I had better say that he attempted to keep it there, for he was not altogether successful. He was a dark, gray-headed, grizzle-cheeked “guinea” or “dago,” as he was scornfully dubbed by the Irish policeman who made his life a burden. His eye was keen, his motion quick, his general bodily make-up active, despite the fact that he was much over fifty years of age. “That’s a good one,” the Irish policeman observed to me in passing, noting that I was looking at him. “He’s a fox. A fine time I have keeping my eye on him.”