AMERICA TO-DAY
I fancy, in which the expectation was father to the thought.
Similarly, Mr. Steevens notes, "No chiropodist worthy of the name but keeps at his door a modelled human foot the size of a cab-horse; and other trades go and do likewise." The "cab-horse" is a monumental exaggeration; but it is true that some chiropodists use as a sign a foot of colossal proportions—the size of a small sheep, let us say, if we must adopt a zoological standard. So far good; but the implication that the streets of New York swarm, like a scene in a harlequinade, with similarly Brobdingnagian signs is quite unfounded. Thus it is, I think, that travellers are apt to seize on isolated eccentricities or extravagances (have we no monstrous signs in England?) and treat them as typical. Mr. Steevens came to America prepared to find everything gigantic, and the chiropodist's foot so agreeably fulfilled his expectation that he thought it unnecessary to look any further—"ex pede Herculem."[1]
The architecture of New York, according to Mr. Steevens, is "the outward expression of the freest, fiercest individualism. . . . Seeing it, you can well understand the admiration of an American
- ↑ One method of advertisement which I observed in Chicago has not yet, so far as I know, been introduced into England. One of the windows of a vast dry-goods store on State Street was fitted up as a dentist's parlour; and when I passed a young lady was reclining in the operating-chair and having her teeth stopped, to the no small delectation of a little crowd which blocked the side-walk.
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