Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1880-08-07
MANHATTANISMS.
The soLsTIrIAL SOLITUDE OF TIE me
TRoPeLIS.
Can ANY Man Make Money Merely by
writingq How George Ripley
Gained Competency.

solstitial season, he can hardly fail to mis-
them when he gets into the region abov
Twenty third street. between Lexington
and Sixth avenues. There the town seem
to have been surrendered to solitude ant
servants, who appear at the basement win
dows, and about the front steps, as evening
comes on, and have any amount of curious
chat concerning their absent masters ant
mistresses. / do not know wheE so many
people have been away. They began tt
60 in May, in consequence OF the prema
ture heat, and they have been going evel
since in increasing numbers. The season
has been one long ethereal discomfort. We
have had
OPPRESSIVE WEATHER
For nearly three months, without any OF
the really cool days which commonly sue
coed, here, lively hot spell. The mer-
curry has not been remarkably hight has
not yet touched l00'-but the sultriness
has been nearly continual, rains and thun-
der-storms, quite frequent this month, hav-
ing had very little, if any, effect on the
atmosphere. 1t has been thus far tropical
summer, and the general suffering has been
! great. Everybody who could get away has
hurried out OF town, and only they are left
whom duty or business detains. As usual
! there are hundreds, yea thousands, OF bust
ness men who stay here during the COM
mercial portion of the day, and then
join their families, scattered through
New jersey, Long Island, Connecticut
and up the Hudson, often spending
Saturday and Sunday with them. In
this way they keep in tolerable condition
Broadway is still crowded, of course, and
Wall, Pearl, Water, Front, Hanover.
| William and South streets continue to be
thronged. But Fifth avenue has singu-
larly empty look. So have Madison and
Park and Lexington avenues, along with
our uptown cross streets. Central Park
is very pleasant but all the snowy
equipages have disappeared and the benches
and promenades are surrendered to our
country cousins they come III as the me-
tropolitans go out-and to the non pros
porous, unconventional folk who
SIT CLOSE TOGETHER AND SPOON
After the shades of night have fallen. 1t
is droll to walk in the Park now at even
ing. and see how the visitors OF different
sex are addicted to sentiment. The num-
Der of one armed men visible there is sur
prising, as we'll as the number of feminine
heads that cannot be easy Until they rest
on their masculine companions shoulders.
1t is really embarrassing to enter the
Park at present after s o'clock P. NJ. One
seems to be witnessing what is not In
tended for the public; but the spoons OBJ
voualy do not care. They go on with
their daIliance as if they were absolutely
alone | suppose that they are alone to
their conception their absorption in one
another makes them seem isolated from
the world Happy souls to be able to so
delude themselves. A man and woman
who make love in public, and not mind the
public have certainly reached rare degree
of Areadian simplicity. The hotels have
lost their activity, though there is steady
stream of arrivals and departures. The
theaters, opera house, concert halls are
barred and hoted. The smaller parks have
been deprived of their BONES, babies and
little children, and have been succeeded by
the loafers and vagabonds who pervade the
swell quarters while the swells are taking
their summer recreation. The club-houses
have
VERY LIVELY ASPECT.
The windows and doors are wide open, but
the rooms are vacant. The servants have
grown tired of waiting for members who
are in Europe, at Newport, Long Branch,
Saratoga, and are nodding in the restau-
rant chairs, dreaming that they are really
in bed. Hackmen doze on their boxes. and
are seldom disturbed by a customer. The
fashionable restaurants like Delmonico's,
the Brunswick, Pinard's show to marked
disadvantage their walters have not or
ders enough to keep them awake. New
York, if not city of the dead, is a city
of the departed. There is reason for say
ing that nobody who is anybody is in
town. | took long stroll the other even
ing-the evening happened to be moder-
ately comfortable-just to see If | could
encounter anyone | knew. | went into
dozen hotels, as many clubs, into several
summer concert places, through forty or
fifty fashionable streets, and Ibid not meet a
soul whom, SO far as my memory served,
/ had ever seen before. | feel good deal
as Alexander Selllirk must have felt on
Juan Fernandez, although / am entirely
conscious that at this moment there are
more than eleven hundred thousand PEG.
pie on Manhattan Island. Ilefeet that |
cannot remember when the absentees have
been so numerous. There are, it is esti-
mated at least one hundred thousand citi-
zens out of town. 1t is positively lonely
here, or would be, if we of the scribbling
guild were not kept 50 busy. supplying
copy. We dash off every once in while,
and hasten back to our posts, only to real
ize that we are living in the midst of a
very populous desert.
Since George Ripley's death l have
heard many persons point to him as an
example of man who gained
A PEcUNIARY COMPETENCY BY HIS PEN,
By regular journalism mainly. Ripley was
in very comfortable circumstances. He
may have had an income, independent of
labor, of $40, 600 or SO, 900, possibly more,
a year. But he was not indebted to
journalism or literature in airy strict sense,
for that. Long as he had been connected
with the Tribune, he never received there
more than S25 week until after the war
had ended. Horace Greeley was opposed
to large salaries on principle, and as Ripley
was always writing more or less for book
publishers, he did not depend at all on his
meager salary from the newspaper. Fer
twelve years before his death he got So a
week as reviewer of the Tribune ; but his
large earnings were from other sources.
AS one of the editors of the American
Cyclopedia his royalty amounted, | be-
lieve, to some 5000 or $40. 900, which
sum he judiciously invested. He also sold
four of his five Tribune shares at $4,000
each, at the time that the late William
Orten purchased fifty-one shares of the
stock, soon after reselling them to White
law Reid, and the advance over what Rip
ley had originally paid must have been
about S25, 200. 1t is in this way that he
got his financial independence, not by cold,
deliberate, thankless composition.
NOT AN INSTANCE CAN BE ADDUcED
Here of man who has acquired any con-
siderable surplus either by literature or
4 =