The moment of first landing in a foreign city is commonly spoken of as a perfect realization of forlornness. My entrance upon American life was anything but this. The spirits of my companions and myself were in a holiday dance while we were receiving our first impressions; and New York always afterwards bore an air of gaiety to me from the association of the early pleasures of foreign travel.

Apartments had been secured for us at a boarding-house in Broadway, and a hackney-coach was in waiting at the wharf. The moonlight was flickering through the trees of the battery, the insects were buzzing all about us, the catydids were grinding, and all the sounds, except human voices, were quite unlike all we had heard for six weeks. One of my companions took the sound of the catydid for a noise in her head, for many hours after coming into their neighbourhood. As we rattled over the stones, I was surprised to find that the street we were in was Broadway;—the lower and narrower end, however: but nothing that I saw, after all I had heard, and the panorama of New York that I had visited in London, disappointed me so much as Broadway.