Clouds Of It Impregnated The Air, And Rendered Respiration And Sight Difficult.

Hundreds of rudely-constructed drays were passing to and fro, heavily laden with merchandize, many of them drawn by

Mules, and the remainder by very light horses of Arabian build; the heavy English dray horse was nowhere to be seen, the breed as I afterwards learned not being cultivated, from a dislike to its ponderousness.

The lower part of Wall-street presented a busy mart-like appearance, every description of goods being piled heterogeneously before the warehouse-doors of their respective owners in the open thoroughfare, which is at this part very wide. Auctioneers were here busily engaged in the disposal of their merchandise, which comprised every variety of produce and manufacture, home and foreign, from a yard of linsey-woolsey, "hum spun" as they termed it, to a bale of Manchester long cloth, or their own Sea-Island cotton. The auctioneer in America is a curious specimen of the biped creation. He is usually a swaggering, consequential sort of fellow, and drives away at his calling with wondrous impudence and pertinacity, dispensing, all the while he is selling, the most fulsome flattery or the grossest abuse on those who stand around. One of these loquacious animals was holding forth to a crowd, just below the _Courier and Inquirer_ newspaper office, where the street widens, as a preliminary introduction to the sale of a quantity of linen goods that had been damaged at a recent fire in the neighbourhood.

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