To the young American, fresh from prosaic money-mad New York, the City of Pleasure presented indeed a novel and beautiful spectacle.

How different, he mused, from his own city with its one fashionable thoroughfare--Fifth Avenue--monotonously lined for miles with hideous brownstone residences, and showing little real animation except during the Saturday afternoon parade when the activities of the smart set, male and female, centred chiefly in such exciting diversions as going to Huyler's for soda, taking tea at the Waldorf, and trying to outdo each other in dress and show.

New York certainly was a dull place with all its boasted cosmopolitanism.
There was no denying that.

Destitute of any natural beauty, handicapped by its cramped geographical position between two rivers, made unsightly by gigantic sky-scrapers and that noisy monstrosity the Elevated Railroad, having no intellectual interests, no art interests, no interest in anything not immediately connected with dollars, it was a city to dwell in and make money in, but hardly a city to _live_ in.

The millionaires were building white-marble palaces, taxing the ingenuity and the originality of the native architects, and thus to some extent relieving the general ugliness and drab commonplaceness, while the merchant princes had begun to invade the lower end of the avenue with handsome shops.