University of Virginia Library

SIDEWALKINGS.

The time occupied in walking to and from my
business I have always found to yield me a certain
mental enjoyment which no other part of the
twenty-four hours could give. Perhaps the physical
exercise may have acted as a gentle stimulant
of the brain, but more probably the comfortable
consciousness that I could not reasonably be expected
to be doing anything else—to be studying
or improving my mind, for instance—always gave
a joyous liberty to my fancy. I once thought it
necessary to employ this interval in doing sums in
arithmetic—in which useful study I was and still
am lamentably deficient—but after one or two attempts
at peripatetic computation, I gave it up. I
am satisfied that much enjoyment is lost to the
world by this nervous anxiety to improve our
leisure moments, which, like the “shining hours”
of Dr. Watts, unfortunately offer the greatest facilities
for idle pleasure. I feel a profound pity for
those misguided beings who are still impelled to
carry text-books with them in cars, omnibuses and
ferry-boats, and who generally manage to defraud

themselves of those intervals of rest they most require.
Nature must must have her fallow moments,
when she covers her exhausted fields with flowers
instead of grain. Deny her this, and the next crop
suffers for it. I offer this axiom as some apology
for obtruding upon the reader a few of the speculations
which have engaged my mind during these
daily perambulations.

Few Californians know how to lounge gracefully.
Business habits and a deference to the custom, even
with those who have no business, give an air of restless
anxiety to every pedestrian. The exceptions to
this rule are apt to go to the other extreme, and
wear a defiant, obtrusive kind of indolence which
suggests quite as much inward disquiet and unrest.
The shiftless lassitude of a gambler can never be
mistaken for the lounge of a gentleman. Even the
brokers who loiter upon Montgomery Street at high
noon are not loungers. Look at them closely and
you will see a feverishness and anxiety under the
mask of listlessness. They do not lounge—they lie
in wait. No surer sign, I imagine, of our peculiar
civilization can be found than this lack of repose in
its constituent elements. You cannot keep Californians
quiet even in their amusements. They dodge
in and out of the theatre, opera and lecture-room;
they prefer the street cars to walking because they
think they get along faster. The difference of locomotion
between Broadway, New York, and Montgomery
Street, San Francisco, is a comparative view
of eastern and western civilization.

There is a habit peculiar to many walkers, which
Punch, some years ago, touched upon satirically, but
which seems to have survived the jester's ridicule.
It is that custom of stopping friends in the street, to
whom we have nothing whatever to communicate,
but whom we embarrass, for no other purpose than
simply to show our friendship. Jones meets his
friend Smith, whom he has met in nearly the same
locality but a few hours before. During that interval,
it is highly probable that no event of any importance
to Smith, nor indeed to Jones, which by a
friendly construction Jones could imagine Smith to
be interested in, has occurred, or is likely to occur.
Yet both gentlemen stop and shake hands earnestly.
“Well, how goes it?” remarks Smith with a vague
hope that something may have happened. “So so,”
replies the eloquent JOnes, feeling intuitively the
deep vacuity of his friend answering to his own. A
pause ensues, in which both gentlemen regard each
other with an imbecile smile and a fervent pressure
of the hand. Smith draws a long breath and looks
up the street; Jones sighs heavily and gazes down
the street. Another pause, in which both gentlemen
disengage their respective hands and glance
anxiously around for some conventional avenue of
escape. Finally, Smith (with a sudden assumption
of having forgotten an important engagement,) ejaculates,
“Well, I must be off,”—a remark instantly
echoed by the voluble Jones, and these gentlemen
separate, only to repeat their miserable formula the
next day. In the above example I have compassionately

shortened the usual leave-taking, which in
skillful hands may be protracted to a length which I
shudder to recall. I have sometimes, when an active
participant in these atrocious transactions, lingered in
the hope of saying something natural to my friend,
(feeling that he too was groping in the mazy labyrinths
of his mind for a like expression,) until I have
felt that we ought to have been separated by a
policeman. It is astonishing how far the most
wretched joke will go in these emergencies, and how
it will, as it were, convulsively detach the two cohering
particles. I have laughed (albeit hysterically)
at some witticism under cover of which I escaped,
that five minutes afterward I could not perceive possessed
a grain of humor. I would advise any person
who may fall into this pitiable strait, that, next
to getting in the way of a passing dray and being
forcibly disconnected, a joke is the most efficacious.
A foreign phrase often may be tried with success: I
have sometimes known Au revoir pronounced “O-reveer,”
to have the effect (as it ought) of severing
friends.

But this is a harmless habit compared to a certain
reprehensible practice in which sundry feeble-minded
young men indulge. I have been stopped in the
street and enthusiastically accosted by some fashionable
young man who has engaged me in animated
conversation, until (quite accidentally) a certain
young belle would pass, whom my friend, of course,
saluted. As, by a strange coincidence, this occurred
several times in the course of the week, and as my

young friend's conversational powers invariably
flagged after the lady had passed, I am forced to believe
that the deceitful young wretch actually used
me as a conventional background to display the
graces of his figure to the passing fair. When I detected
the trick, of course I made a point of keeping
my friend, by strategic movements, with his back toward
the young lady, while I bowed to her myself.
Since then, I understand that it is a regular custom
of these callow youths, to encounter each other, with
simulated cordiality, some paces in front of the
young lady they wish to recognize, so that she cannot
possibly cut them. The corner of California and
Montgomery Streets is their favorite haunt. They
may be easily detected by their furtive expression of
eye, which betrays them even in the height of their
apparent enthusiasm.

Speaking of eyes, you can generally settle the
average gentility and good breeding of the people
you meet in the street by the manner in which they
return or evade your glance. “A gentleman,” as the
Autocrat has wisely said, is always “calm-eyed.”
There is just enough abstraction in his look to denote
his individual power and the capacity for self-contemplation,
while he is, nevertheless, quietly and unobtrusively
observant. He does not seek, neither does he
evade, your observation. Snobs and prigs do the
first; bashful and mean people do the second. There
are some men who, on meeting your eye, immediately
assume an expression quite different from the one
which they previously wore, which, whether an improvement

or not, suggests a disagreeable self-consciousness.
Perhaps they fancy they are betraying
something. There are others who return your look
with unnecessary defiance, which suggests a like concealment.
The symptoms of the eye are generally
borne out in the figure. A man is very apt to betray
his character by the manner in which he appropriates
his part of the sidewalk. The man who resolutely
keeps the middle of the pavement, and deliberately
brushes against you, you may be certain
would take the last piece of pie at the hotel table,
and empty the cream jug on its way to your cup.
The man who sidles by you, keeping close to the
houses, and selecting the easiest planks, manages to
slip through life in some such way, and to evade
its sternest duties. The awkward man, who gets
in your way, and throws you back upon the man
behind you, and so manages to derange the harmonious
procession of an entire block, is very apt to
do the same thing in political and social economy.
The inquisitive man, who deliberately shortens his
pace, so that he may participate in the confidence
you impart to your companion, has an eye not
unfamiliar to keyholes, and probably opens his
wife's letters. The loud man, who talks with the
intention of being overheard, is the same egotist
elsewhere. If there was any justice in Iago's
sneer, that there were some “so weak of soul that
in their sleep they mutter their affairs,” what shall
be said of the walking reverie-babblers? I have
met men who were evidently rolling over, “like a
sweet morsel under the tongue,” some speech they
were about to make, and others who were framing
curses. I remember once that, while walking behind
an apparently respectable old gentleman, he
suddenly uttered the exclamation, “Well, I'm
d—d!” and then quietly resumed his usual manner.
Whether he had at that moment become impressed
with a truly orthodox disbelief in his ultimate salvation,
or whether he was simply indignant, I never
could tell.

I have been hesitating for some time to speak—
or if indeed to speak at all—of that lovely and critic-defying
sex, whose bright eyes and voluble prattle
have not been without effect in tempering the austerities
of my peripatetic musing. I have been humbly
thankful that I have been permitted to view their
bright dresses and those charming bonnets which
seem to have brought the birds and flowers of spring
within the dreary limits of the town, and—I trust
I shall not be deemed unkind in saying it—my
pleasure was not lessened by the reflection that the
display, to me at least, was inexpensive. I have
walked in—and I fear occasionally on—the train of
the loveliest of her sex who has preceded me. If I
have sometimes wondered why two young ladies always
began to talk vivaciously on the approach of
any good-looking fellow; if I have wondered whether
the mirror-like qualities of all large show-windows
at all influenced their curiosity regarding silks and
calicoes; if I have ever entertained the same ungentlemanly
thought concerning daguerreotype show cases;

if I have ever misinterpreted the eye-shot which has
passed between two pretty women—more searching,
exhaustive and sincere than any of our feeble ogles;
if I have ever committed these or any other impertinences,
it was only to retire beaten and discomfitted,
and to confess that masculine philosophy, while
it soars beyond Sirius and the ring of Saturn, stops
short at the steel periphery which encompasses the
simplest school-girl.