People laughed, and were
willing to expend a cent the next day to see what new folly the man
would commit or relate. We all like to read about our own neighborhood;
this paper gratified the propensity.
"The man, we repeat, had really a vein of poetry in him, and the first
numbers of 'The Herald' show it. He had occasion one day to mention that
Broadway was about to be paved with wooden blocks. This was not a very
promising subject for a poetical comment, but he added: 'When this is
done, every vehicle will have to wear sleigh-bells, as in sleighing
times, and Broadway will be so quiet that you can pay a compliment to a
lady, in passing, and she will hear you.' This was nothing in itself;
but here was a man wrestling with fate in a cellar, who could turn you
out two hundred such paragraphs a week, the year round. Men can growl in
a cellar; this man could laugh, and keep laughing, and make the floating
population of a city laugh with him. It must be owned, too, that he had
a little real insight into the nature of things around him--a little
Scotch sense, as well as an inexhaustible fund of French vivacity.
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