"Ah, you have me there!" the younger said, and he laughed generously. "Or you would have if I hadn't noticed something like amelioration in the chauffeurs. At any rate, the taxis are cheaper than they were, and I suppose something will be done about the street traffic some time. They're talking now about subway crossings. But I should prefer overhead foot-bridges at all the corners, crossing one another diagonally. They would look like triumphal arches, and would serve the purpose of any future Dewey victory if we should happen to have another hero to win one." "Well, we must hope for the best. I rather like the notion of the diagonal foot-bridges. But why not Rows along the second stories as they have them in Chester? I should be pretty sure of always getting home alive if we had them. Now if I'm not telephoned for at a hospital before I'm restored to consciousness, I think myself pretty lucky. And yet it seems but yesterday, as the people used to say in the plays, since I had a pride in counting the automobiles as I walked up the Avenue. Once I got as high as twenty before I reached Fifty-ninth Street. Now I couldn't count as many horse vehicles." The elder sage mocked himself in a feeble laugh, but the younger tried to be serious. "We don't realize the absolute change. Our streets are not streets any more; they are railroad tracks with locomotives let loose on them, and no signs up to warn people at the crossings. It's pathetic to see the foot-passengers saving themselves, especially the poor, pretty, high-heeled women, looking this way and that in their fright, and then tottering over as fast as they can totter." "Well, I should have said it was outrageous, humiliating, insulting, once, but I don't any more; it would be no use." "No; and so much depends upon the point of view. When I'm on foot I feel all my rights invaded, but when I'm in a taxi it amuses me to see the women escaping; and I boil with rage in being halted at every other corner by the policeman with his new-fangled semaphore, and it's "Go" and "Stop" in red and blue, and my taxi-clock going round all the time and getting me in for a dollar when I thought I should keep within seventy cents. Then I feel that pedestrians of every age and sex ought to be killed." "Yes, there's something always in the point of view; and there's some comfort when you're stopped in your taxi to feel that they often _do_ get killed." The sages laughed together, and the younger said: "I suppose when we get aeroplanes in common use, there'll be annoying traffic regulations, and policemen anchored out at intervals in the central blue to enforce them. After all--"