The Lens of Time

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Where they beheld only a drop of rain slowly rolling down the window-glass, I saw a universe of beings animated with all the passions common to physical life, and convulsing their minute sphere with struggles as fierce and protracted as those of men.

Broadway swarmed with life like water in a stagnant pond. Scarlet and yellow omnibuses raced through the open parts of the street and locked wheels where it was narrower. At irregular intervals they stopped to discharge passengers. When the passengers stretched their hands through a hole in the roof to pay the conductor his ransom for release, he pulled a cord that opened the door and deposited them in a sea of slippery mud, to run a gauntlet of cart wheels and horses’ hooves, before they could reach the relative safety of the pavement next to the buildings. Loaded stages stopped in front of hotels such as the Astor House or the St. Nicholas. Railway cars holding as many as thirty persons and drawn by two or even four horses came down the side streets. All these among the carriages, the commercial wagons, and the foot traffic contributed to the clutter and the crush. Next to the buildings or leaning over into the gutters were boxes, buckets, lidless flour barrels, baskets, decayed tea chests, rusty iron pans, and earthenware jars full of ashes and vegetable refuse. All contributed their share of foul odors to that of the horse dung steaming in the ankle-deep mire of the street.

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