FIVE MINUTES IN NEW YORK.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 378, 19 June 1889, Page 6

FIVE MINUTES IN NEW YORK.

A middle-aged man bundled up in a big, thick, blue coat with an old-fashioned, long, broad, vari-coloured scarf wrapped three times around his neck, and covering his mouth ; an elaborately diessed woman without a cloak or wrap, and carrying a fine spring sunshade above her head ; half-a-dozen bootblacks lazily pitching pennies ; half-a-do::en newsboys struggling 1 , all of them, to sell a single paper to one man ; a pale-faced man begging passers-by for • five cents to get something to eat ;' a couple of laughing, careless schoolgirls helping themselves to caramels from a little box that a young fellow with them was carrying ; a Uttle Italian girl staggering along under a load of wood on her bead ; a pretty Brooklyn child stepping along by her mother's side and hugging a lace and silkdressed dolly under her arm ; a downtown bunco-steerer scanning the faces of all passing him ; a clergyman of St. Paul's scarcely seeing anybody as he sauntered 'meditatively along ; hundreds of the idle and unemployed sitting on the benches, and thousands 1 of the engaged and over-worked-hurrying past them with genuine New York haste — all these contrasts were' to be seen in City Hall Park in five minutes' time. The walks in the little square are' the most thickly travelled cross roads of the metropolis, and" from midday to midday the shifting scenes are among the most interesting and suggestive of all the sights afforded in the town,