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The houses of Havana are low; the streets are narrow; the sidewalks ditto: there is an occasional plaza of broad, white glare, which must be intolerable in summer-time. The Prado has trees which are rather Dutch than tropical; and the Paseo, where the driving is, is quite a fine avenue. This afternoon, though it is Lent, the Carnival will rage there.
From pictures I had seen in books at home, my idea was that when soldiers departed for war, beautiful ladies stood on balconies and waved snowy-white handkerchiefs at the troops, while the men stood on the sidewalks and corners and swung their hats and cheered. There may have been regiments so favored, but ours was not one of them.
Two or three decades since it was a tight roof, thinly plastered walls, and a chimney with "thimble-holes for stoves," possibly a furnace with small tin flues, a well or cistern, or perhaps one faucet delivering a small stream of water. To-day even in the suburbs there is furnished light, heat, abundant water, care of halls and sidewalks.
I walked down the busy High Street that night in Cologne, and the bright shop-windows with their chocolates and fruit apples from Canada and Hood River crowded cafes, people overflowing sidewalks into the narrow streets somehow reminded me of the cheerful Bordeaux I tramped through in November.
Through this ugly huddle we passed first: there were working men on the sidewalks, gamins in the gutters, nothing to remind one of the war. "Halt!" At a turn in the road near the outskirts of the city, a sentry, a small, gray-haired man, had stepped out before the car.
New York was getting ready to celebrate the night before New Year's, the maddest night of all the year in old Manhattan, when groups of merrymakers, carrying tin horns and jingling cow-bells, crowd the sidewalks, singing and shouting, forming flying wedges, swooping down on other wedges strangers all the whole ending in roars of laughter and "Happy New Year's," repeated again and again until the next collision.
I'm sure it was him that done it. And maybe he thinks about that feller now, and wonders if he tumbled down just about the same way. Them things come up in a man's mind." Bivouac fires upon the sidewalks, in the streets, in the yards, threw high their wavering reflections, which examined, like slim, red fingers, the dingy, scarred walls and the piles of tumbled brick.
To-night I reach Cheyenne, where I find a bicycle club of twenty members, and where the fame of my journey from San Francisco draws such a crowd on the corner where I alight, that a blue-coated guardian of the city's sidewalks requests me to saunter on over to the hotel. Do I. Yes, I saunter over. The Cheyenne "cops" are bold, bad men to trifle with.
All these odd people, astonishing a little and interesting greatly the groups of Parisians gathered above on the sidewalks, crossed the gangway leading to the boat, and, spreading about on the deck, gazed at the banks and the houses, or listened to the czardas which the Hungarian musicians were playing with a sort of savage frenzy beneath the French tricolor united to the three colors of their own country.
It was that one hour of the night a quarter of eleven o'clock, while the last acts are still going on and before the theatres give up their audiences when Broadway's sidewalks are not absolutely overflowing with jostling, pouring currents of people. Numbers were abroad, for numbers always are abroad in this part of the town, be the time of day or of night what it may, but there was no congestion.
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