FLORIDA AND THE WEST INDIES 19 



growler, and the driver, with his warm brogue and 

 expensive dignity, may be descended from the Kings 

 of Connaught. True, also, the bedroom, with its 

 private bathroom, telephone, escritoire, and roomy 

 hanging cupboards, would not disgrace the embassy 

 of a first-class Power, and is lit with a blaze that 

 would do credit to the window of a Bond Street 

 jeweller. This luxury is the keynote of life in the 

 United States so far as cities go, with a correspond- 

 ing squalor in smaller or more remote centres that 

 is unknown in older countries. Much of the 

 comfort of hotel life would be gladly missed if only 

 the charges were more reasonable. 



It was surely Gilead Beck who described New 

 York as a hard city for the man without dollars. 

 Money talks there and can buy everything but 

 quiet. If Americans wanted quiet, they would seek 

 it in London or Paris ; in New York, the only rest is 

 in the cemetery. The fact is that no living American 

 wants rest until he is dead, and then the cemetery 

 does well enough. The daily routine is one long 

 breathless pageant of hustle and fret, of beggar-my- 

 neighbour and the breeding of greenbacks. The 

 streets, long, regular and well-paved up-town, but 

 abominably out of repair down east, impressed me 

 much as they would impress any other hater of great 

 hives. During my first walk from the safe precincts 

 of my hotel, I realised that a man must push or be 

 pushed, for there is not room for all on the sidewalk. 

 I stood one evening on Brooklyn Bridge, a little 

 above the highly electrified focus of many cars, in 

 an eddy as it were of the human tideway, and 

 thence I watched a third of New York surging back 

 over the river, men fighting like wounded grizzlies 



