Chinaman  can  find  a  whole  street  devoted  to  the  selling  of
his  teas,  his  native  idols  stare  him  in  the  face  as  advertise-
ments before  a  Yankee  shop  door,  and  all  the  ladies  on  Broad-
way are  toying  with  his  fans ;  the  Irishman  rules  the  city,  and
hoist,3  his  green  flag  upon  the  public  buildings  ;  the  African
is  the  most  important  man  in  the  crowd,  and  expects  soon  to
colonize  the  whites  in  British  America,  or  somewhere  else,
while  the  German  has  his  sangerbunds  and  his  schutzenfesta
and  lager  bier,  and  runs  a  halle  and  a  boarding  haus.  Great
is  the  mystery  of  New  York.
"But  to  the  patterers.  These  are  that  large  class  of  people
who  hawk  their  wares  upon  the  street,  or  get  a  living  at  a
stand.  Some  of  them  do  a  thriving  trade,  others  barely  eke
out  a  miserable  existence.  Take  them  all  in  all,  and  they
are  a  very  curious  class  of  people,  interesting  to  study.  A
large  number  of  them  are  women,  from  the  oldest  gray -haired
grandmother,  tottering  on  her  cane,  down  to  the  young
woman  of  sixteen.  There  are  numerous  little  girls  struggling
to  get  a  living,  too,  from  three  years  old  upwards.  The
women  always  excite  our  pity,  and  we  patronize  them  in
preference  to  the  men.
"  The  women  patterers  are  usually  a  very  ugly-looking
set.  That  is,  they  are  not  handsome.  Most  of  them  are
Irishwomen,  although  we  now  and  then  see  an  Italian  or
German  woman.  "We  never  saw  more  than  two  American
women  patterers  in  New  York,  and  have  no  recollection  of
ever  seeing  a  Jewess,  a  Scotch  woman,  or  a  Spanish  woman.
