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Title: The Four Million

Author: O. Henry

Release date: August 1, 2001 [eBook #2776]
Most recently updated: October 21, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2776

Credits: Project Gutenberg volunteers and revised by Joseph E.
Loewenstein, M.D.

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FOUR
MILLION ***

The Four Million

by O. Henry

Contents

TOBIN’S PALM
THE GIFT OF THE MAGI
A COSMOPOLITE IN A CAFÉ
BETWEEN ROUNDS
THE SKYLIGHT ROOM
A SERVICE OF LOVE
THE COMING-OUT OF MAGGIE
MAN ABOUT TOWN
THE COP AND THE ANTHEM
AN ADJUSTMENT OF NATURE
MEMOIRS OF A YELLOW DOG
THE LOVE-PHILTRE OF IKEY SCHOENSTEIN
MAMMON AND THE ARCHER
SPRINGTIME À LA CARTE
THE GREEN DOOR
FROM THE CABBY’S SEAT
AN UNFINISHED STORY
THE CALIPH, CUPID AND THE CLOCK
SISTERS OF THE GOLDEN CIRCLE
THE ROMANCE OF A BUSY BROKER
AFTER TWENTY YEARS
LOST ON DRESS PARADE
BY COURIER
THE FURNISHED ROOM
THE BRIEF DÉBUT OF TILDY

TOBIN’S PALM

Tobin and me, the two of us, went down to Coney one day, for there was
four dollars between us, and Tobin had need of distractions. For there was
Katie Mahorner, his sweetheart, of County Sligo, lost since she started for
America three months before with two hundred dollars, her own savings,
and one hundred dollars from the sale of Tobin’s inherited estate, a fine
cottage and pig on the Bog Shannaugh. And since the letter that Tobin got
saying that she had started to come to him not a bit of news had he heard or
seen of Katie Mahorner. Tobin advertised in the papers, but nothing could
be found of the colleen.
So, to Coney me and Tobin went, thinking that a turn at the chutes and
the smell of the popcorn might raise the heart in his bosom. But Tobin was a
hardheaded man, and the sadness stuck in his skin. He ground his teeth at
the crying balloons; he cursed the moving pictures; and, though he would
drink whenever asked, he scorned Punch and Judy, and was for licking the
tintype men as they came.
So I gets him down a side way on a board walk where the attractions
were some less violent. At a little six by eight stall Tobin halts, with a more
human look in his eye.
“’Tis here,” says he, “I will be diverted. I’ll have the palm of me hand
investigated by the wonderful palmist of the Nile, and see if what is to be
will be.”
Tobin was a believer in signs and the unnatural in nature. He possessed
illegal convictions in his mind along the subjects of black cats, lucky
numbers, and the weather predictions in the papers.
We went into the enchanted chicken coop, which was fixed mysterious
with red cloth and pictures of hands with lines crossing ’em like a railroad
centre. The sign over the door says it is Madame Zozo the Egyptian
Palmist. There was a fat woman inside in a red jumper with pothooks and

beasties embroidered upon it. Tobin gives her ten cents and extends one of
his hands. She lifts Tobin’s hand, which is own brother to the hoof of a
drayhorse, and examines it to see whether ’tis a stone in the frog or a cast
shoe he has come for.
“Man,” says this Madame Zozo, “the line of your fate shows—”
“’Tis not me foot at all,” says Tobin, interrupting. “Sure, ’tis no beauty,
but ye hold the palm of me hand.”
“The line shows,” says the Madame, “that ye’ve not arrived at your time
of life without bad luck. And there’s more to come. The mount of Venus—
or is that a stone bruise?—shows that ye’ve been in love. There’s been
trouble in your life on account of your sweetheart.”
“’Tis Katie Mahorner she has references with,” whispers Tobin to me in a
loud voice to one side.
“I see,” says the palmist, “a great deal of sorrow and tribulation with one
whom ye cannot forget. I see the lines of designation point to the letter K
and the letter M in her name.”
“Whist!” says Tobin to me, “do ye hear that?”
“Look out,” goes on the palmist, “for a dark man and a light woman; for
they’ll both bring ye trouble. Ye’ll make a voyage upon the water very
soon, and have a financial loss. I see one line that brings good luck. There’s
a man coming into your life who will fetch ye good fortune. Ye’ll know him
when ye see him by his crooked nose.”
“Is his name set down?” asks Tobin. “’Twill be convenient in the way of
greeting when he backs up to dump off the good luck.”
“His name,” says the palmist, thoughtful looking, “is not spelled out by
the lines, but they indicate ’tis a long one, and the letter ‘o’ should be in it.
There’s no more to tell. Good-evening. Don’t block up the door.”
“’Tis wonderful how she knows,” says Tobin as we walk to the pier.
As we squeezed through the gates a nigger man sticks his lighted segar
against Tobin’s ear, and there is trouble. Tobin hammers his neck, and the
women squeal, and by presence of mind I drag the little man out of the way
before the police comes. Tobin is always in an ugly mood when enjoying
himself.

On the boat going back, when the man calls “Who wants the good-
looking waiter?” Tobin tried to plead guilty, feeling the desire to blow the
foam off a crock of suds, but when he felt in his pocket he found himself
discharged for lack of evidence. Somebody had disturbed his change during
the commotion. So we sat, dry, upon the stools, listening to the Dagoes
fiddling on deck. If anything, Tobin was lower in spirits and less congenial
with his misfortunes than when we started.
On a seat against the railing was a young woman dressed suitable for red
automobiles, with hair the colour of an unsmoked meerschaum. In passing
by, Tobin kicks her foot without intentions, and, being polite to ladies when
in drink, he tries to give his hat a twist while apologising. But he knocks it
off, and the wind carries it overboard.
Tobin came back and sat down, and I began to look out for him, for the
man’s adversities were becoming frequent. He was apt, when pushed so
close by hard luck, to kick the best dressed man he could see, and try to
take command of the boat.
Presently Tobin grabs my arm and says, excited: “Jawn,” says he, “do ye
know what we’re doing? We’re taking a voyage upon the water.”
“There now,” says I; “subdue yeself. The boat’ll land in ten minutes
more.”
“Look,” says he, “at the light lady upon the bench. And have ye forgotten
the nigger man that burned me ear? And isn’t the money I had gone—a
dollar sixty-five it was?”
I thought he was no more than summing up his catastrophes so as to get
violent with good excuse, as men will do, and I tried to make him
understand such things was trifles.
“Listen,” says Tobin. “Ye’ve no ear for the gift of prophecy or the
miracles of the inspired. What did the palmist lady tell ye out of me hand?
’Tis coming true before your eyes. ‘Look out,’ says she, ‘for a dark man and
a light woman; they’ll bring ye trouble.’ Have ye forgot the nigger man,
though he got some of it back from me fist? Can ye show me a lighter
woman than the blonde lady that was the cause of me hat falling in the
water? And where’s the dollar sixty-five I had in me vest when we left the
shooting gallery?”

The way Tobin put it, it did seem to corroborate the art of prediction,
though it looked to me that these accidents could happen to any one at
Coney without the implication of palmistry.
Tobin got up and walked around on deck, looking close at the passengers
out of his little red eyes. I asked him the interpretation of his movements.
Ye never know what Tobin has in his mind until he begins to carry it out.
“Ye should know,” says he, “I’m working out the salvation promised by
the lines in me palm. I’m looking for the crooked-nose man that’s to bring
the good luck. ’Tis all that will save us. Jawn, did ye ever see a straighter-
nosed gang of hellions in the days of your life?”
’Twas the nine-thirty boat, and we landed and walked up-town through
Twenty-second Street, Tobin being without his hat.
On a street corner, standing under a gas-light and looking over the
elevated road at the moon, was a man. A long man he was, dressed decent,
with a segar between his teeth, and I saw that his nose made two twists
from bridge to end, like the wriggle of a snake. Tobin saw it at the same
time, and I heard him breathe hard like a horse when you take the saddle
off. He went straight up to the man, and I went with him.
“Good-night to ye,” Tobin says to the man. The man takes out his segar
and passes the compliments, sociable.
“Would ye hand us your name,” asks Tobin, “and let us look at the size of
it? It may be our duty to become acquainted with ye.”
“My name” says the man, polite, “is Friedenhausman—Maximus G.
Friedenhausman.”
“’Tis the right length,” says Tobin. “Do you spell it with an ‘o’ anywhere
down the stretch of it?”
“I do not,” says the man.
“Can ye spell it with an ‘o’?” inquires Tobin, turning anxious.
“If your conscience,” says the man with the nose, “is indisposed toward
foreign idioms ye might, to please yourself, smuggle the letter into the
penultimate syllable.”
“’Tis well,” says Tobin. “Ye’re in the presence of Jawn Malone and
Daniel Tobin.”

“Tis highly appreciated,” says the man, with a bow. “And now since I
cannot conceive that ye would hold a spelling bee upon the street corner,
will ye name some reasonable excuse for being at large?”
“By the two signs,” answers Tobin, trying to explain, “which ye display
according to the reading of the Egyptian palmist from the sole of me hand,
ye’ve been nominated to offset with good luck the lines of trouble leading
to the nigger man and the blonde lady with her feet crossed in the boat,
besides the financial loss of a dollar sixty-five, all so far fulfilled according
to Hoyle.”
The man stopped smoking and looked at me.
“Have ye any amendments,” he asks, “to offer to that statement, or are ye
one too? I thought by the looks of ye ye might have him in charge.”
“None,” says I to him, “except that as one horseshoe resembles another
so are ye the picture of good luck as predicted by the hand of me friend. If
not, then the lines of Danny’s hand may have been crossed, I don’t know.”
“There’s two of ye,” says the man with the nose, looking up and down
for the sight of a policeman. “I’ve enjoyed your company immense. Good-
night.”
With that he shoves his segar in his mouth and moves across the street,
stepping fast. But Tobin sticks close to one side of him and me at the other.
“What!” says he, stopping on the opposite sidewalk and pushing back his
hat; “do ye follow me? I tell ye,” he says, very loud, “I’m proud to have met
ye. But it is my desire to be rid of ye. I am off to me home.”
“Do,” says Tobin, leaning against his sleeve. “Do be off to your home.
And I will sit at the door of it till ye come out in the morning. For the
dependence is upon ye to obviate the curse of the nigger man and the
blonde lady and the financial loss of the one-sixty-five.”
“’Tis a strange hallucination,” says the man, turning to me as a more
reasonable lunatic. “Hadn’t ye better get him home?”
“Listen, man,” says I to him. “Daniel Tobin is as sensible as he ever was.
Maybe he is a bit deranged on account of having drink enough to disturb
but not enough to settle his wits, but he is no more than following out the
legitimate path of his superstitions and predicaments, which I will explain
to you.” With that I relates the facts about the palmist lady and how the
finger of suspicion points to him as an instrument of good fortune. “Now,

understand,” I concludes, “my position in this riot. I am the friend of me
friend Tobin, according to me interpretations. ’Tis easy to be a friend to the
prosperous, for it pays; ’tis not hard to be a friend to the poor, for ye get
puffed up by gratitude and have your picture printed standing in front of a
tenement with a scuttle of coal and an orphan in each hand. But it strains
the art of friendship to be true friend to a born fool. And that’s what I’m
doing,” says I, “for, in my opinion, there’s no fortune to be read from the
palm of me hand that wasn’t printed there with the handle of a pick. And,
though ye’ve got the crookedest nose in New York City, I misdoubt that all
the fortune-tellers doing business could milk good luck from ye. But the
lines of Danny’s hand pointed to ye fair, and I’ll assist him to experiment
with ye until he’s convinced ye’re dry.”
After that the man turns, sudden, to laughing. He leans against a corner
and laughs considerable. Then he claps me and Tobin on the backs of us and
takes us by an arm apiece.
“’Tis my mistake,” says he. “How could I be expecting anything so fine
and wonderful to be turning the corner upon me? I came near being found
unworthy. Hard by,” says he, “is a café, snug and suitable for the
entertainment of idiosyncrasies. Let us go there and have drink while we
discuss the unavailability of the categorical.”
So saying, he marched me and Tobin to the back room of a saloon, and
ordered the drinks, and laid the money on the table. He looks at me and
Tobin like brothers of his, and we have the segars.
“Ye must know,” says the man of destiny, “that me walk in life is one that
is called the literary. I wander abroad be night seeking idiosyncrasies in the
masses and truth in the heavens above. When ye came upon me I was in
contemplation of the elevated road in conjunction with the chief luminary
of night. The rapid transit is poetry and art: the moon but a tedious, dry
body, moving by rote. But these are private opinions, for, in the business of
literature, the conditions are reversed. ’Tis me hope to be writing a book to
explain the strange things I have discovered in life.”
“Ye will put me in a book,” says Tobin, disgusted; “will ye put me in a
book?”
“I will not,” says the man, “for the covers will not hold ye. Not yet. The
best I can do is to enjoy ye meself, for the time is not ripe for destroying the

limitations of print. Ye would look fantastic in type. All alone by meself
must I drink this cup of joy. But, I thank ye, boys; I am truly grateful.”
“The talk of ye,” says Tobin, blowing through his moustache and
pounding the table with his fist, “is an eyesore to me patience. There was
good luck promised out of the crook of your nose, but ye bear fruit like the
bang of a drum. Ye resemble, with your noise of books, the wind blowing
through a crack. Sure, now, I would be thinking the palm of me hand lied
but for the coming true of the nigger man and the blonde lady and—”
“Whist!” says the long man; “would ye be led astray by physiognomy?
Me nose will do what it can within bounds. Let us have these glasses filled
again, for ’tis good to keep idiosyncrasies well moistened, they being
subject to deterioration in a dry moral atmosphere.”
So, the man of literature makes good, to my notion, for he pays, cheerful,
for everything, the capital of me and Tobin being exhausted by prediction.
But Tobin is sore, and drinks quiet, with the red showing in his eye.
By and by we moved out, for ’twas eleven o’clock, and stands a bit upon
the sidewalk. And then the man says he must be going home, and invites me
and Tobin to walk that way. We arrives on a side street two blocks away
where there is a stretch of brick houses with high stoops and iron fences.
The man stops at one of them and looks up at the top windows which he
finds dark.
“’Tis me humble dwelling,” says he, “and I begin to perceive by the signs
that me wife has retired to slumber. Therefore I will venture a bit in the way
of hospitality. ’Tis me wish that ye enter the basement room, where we
dine, and partake of a reasonable refreshment. There will be some fine cold
fowl and cheese and a bottle or two of ale. Ye will be welcome to enter and
eat, for I am indebted to ye for diversions.”
The appetite and conscience of me and Tobin was congenial to the
proposition, though ’twas sticking hard in Danny’s superstitions to think
that a few drinks and a cold lunch should represent the good fortune
promised by the palm of his hand.
“Step down the steps,” says the man with the crooked nose, “and I will
enter by the door above and let ye in. I will ask the new girl we have in the
kitchen,” says he, “to make ye a pot of coffee to drink before ye go. ’Tis
fine coffee Katie Mahorner makes for a green girl just landed three months.
Step in,” says the man, “and I’ll send her down to ye.”

THE GIFT OF THE MAGI

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was
in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer
and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the
silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times
Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day
would be Christmas.
There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch
and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is
made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage
to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week. It
did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the
lookout for the mendicancy squad.
In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and
an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also
appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name “Mr. James Dillingham
Young.” The “Dillingham” had been flung to the breeze during a former
period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now,
when the income was shrunk to $20, the letters of “Dillingham” looked
blurred, as though they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest
and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home
and reached his flat above he was called “Jim” and greatly hugged by Mrs.
James Dillingham Young, already
introduced to you as Della. Which is all very good.
Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag.
She stood by the window and looked out dully at a grey cat walking a grey
fence in a grey backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had
only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every

penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn’t
go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are.
Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a happy hour she had
spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and
sterling—something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honour of
being owned by Jim.
There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you
have seen a pier-glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may,
by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain
a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della, being slender, had mastered
the art.
Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. Her
eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its colour within twenty
seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.
Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in
which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim’s gold watch that had
been his father’s and his grandfather’s. The other was Della’s hair. Had the
Queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della would have let her
hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty’s
jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures
piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time
he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.
So now Della’s beautiful hair fell about her, rippling and shining like a
cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost
a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once
she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or two splashed on the
worn red carpet.
On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl
of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out the
door and down the stairs to the street.
Where she stopped the sign read: “Mme. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All
Kinds.” One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame,
large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the “Sofronie.”
“Will you buy my hair?” asked Della.

“I buy hair,” said Madame. “Take yer hat off and let’s have a sight at the
looks of it.”
Down rippled the brown cascade. “Twenty dollars,” said Madame, lifting
the mass with a practised hand.
“Give it to me quick,” said Della.
Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed
metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim’s present.
She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else.
There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of
them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design,
properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious
ornamentation—as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The
Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim’s. It was like him.
Quietness and value—the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars
they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With that
chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any
company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on
account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.
When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence
and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to
work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is
always a tremendous task, dear friends—a mammoth task.
Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls
that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her
reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.
“If Jim doesn’t kill me,” she said to herself, “before he takes a second
look at me, he’ll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I
do—oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty-seven cents?”
At 7 o’clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of
the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.
Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on
the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard
his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for
just a moment. She had a habit for saying little silent prayers about the

simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: “Please God, make him
think I am still pretty.”
The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and
very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two—and to be burdened
with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.
Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of
quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in them
that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise,
nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been
prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression
on his face.
Della wriggled off the table and went for him.
“Jim, darling,” she cried, “don’t look at me that way. I had my hair cut
off and sold because I couldn’t have lived through Christmas without giving
you a present. It’ll grow out again—you won’t mind, will you? I just had to
do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say ‘Merry Christmas!’ Jim, and let’s be
happy. You don’t know what a nice—what a beautiful, nice gift I’ve got for
you.”
“You’ve cut off your hair?” asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not
arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.
“Cut it off and sold it,” said Della. “Don’t you like me just as well,
anyhow? I’m me without my hair, ain’t I?”
Jim looked about the room curiously.
“You say your hair is gone?” he said, with an air almost of idiocy.
“You needn’t look for it,” said Della. “It’s sold, I tell you—sold and
gone, too. It’s Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you.
Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered,” she went on with sudden
serious sweetness, “but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I
put the chops on, Jim?”
Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For
ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object
in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year—what is the
difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer.
The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark
assertion will be illuminated later on.

Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.
“Don’t make any mistake, Dell,” he said, “about me. I don’t think there’s
anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make
me like my girl any less. But if you’ll unwrap that package you may see
why you had me going a while at first.”
White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an
ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical
tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the
comforting powers of the lord of the flat.
For there lay The Combs—the set of combs, side and back, that Della
had worshipped long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise
shell, with jewelled rims—just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished
hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply
craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And
now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted
adornments were gone.
But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up
with dim eyes and a smile and say: “My hair grows so fast, Jim!”
And then Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, “Oh, oh!”
Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly
upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with a
reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.
“Isn’t it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You’ll have to
look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to
see how it looks on it.”
Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands
under the back of his head and smiled.
“Dell,” said he, “let’s put our Christmas presents away and keep ’em a
while. They’re too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the
money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on.”
The magi, as you know, were wise men—wonderfully wise men—who
brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving
Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones,
possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I
have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children

in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures
of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that
of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive
gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the
magi.

A COSMOPOLITE IN A CAFÉ

At midnight the café was crowded. By some chance the little table at
which I sat had escaped the eye of incomers, and two vacant chairs at it
extended their arms with venal hospitality to the influx of patrons.
And then a cosmopolite sat in one of them, and I was glad, for I held a
theory that since Adam no true citizen of the world has existed. We hear of
them, and we see foreign labels on much luggage, but we find travellers
instead of cosmopolites.
I invoke your consideration of the scene—the marble-topped tables, the
range of leather-upholstered wall seats, the gay company, the ladies dressed
in demi-state toilets, speaking in an exquisite visible chorus of taste,
economy, opulence or art; the sedulous and largess-loving garçons, the
music wisely catering to all with its raids upon the composers; the mélange
of talk and laughter—and, if you will, the Würzburger in the tall glass cones
that bend to your lips as a ripe cherry sways on its branch to the beak of a
robber jay. I was told by a sculptor from Mauch Chunk that the scene was
truly Parisian.
My cosmopolite was named E. Rushmore Coglan, and he will be heard
from next summer at Coney Island. He is to establish a new “attraction”
there, he informed me, offering kingly diversion. And then his conversation
rang along parallels of latitude and longitude. He took the great, round
world in his hand, so to speak, familiarly, contemptuously, and it seemed no
larger than the seed of a Maraschino cherry in a table d’hôte grape fruit. He
spoke disrespectfully of the equator, he skipped from continent to continent,
he derided the zones, he mopped up the high seas with his napkin. With a
wave of his hand he would speak of a certain bazaar in Hyderabad. Whiff!
He would have you on skis in Lapland. Zip! Now you rode the breakers
with the Kanakas at Kealaikahiki. Presto! He dragged you through an
Arkansas post-oak swamp, let you dry for a moment on the alkali plains of
his Idaho ranch, then whirled you into the society of Viennese archdukes.

Anon he would be telling you of a cold he acquired in a Chicago lake
breeze and how old Escamila cured it in Buenos Ayres with a hot infusion
of the chuchula weed. You would have addressed a letter to “E. Rushmore
Coglan, Esq., the Earth, Solar System, the Universe,” and have mailed it,
feeling confident that it would be delivered to him.
I was sure that I had found at last the one true cosmopolite since Adam,
and I listened to his worldwide discourse fearful lest I should discover in it
the local note of the mere globe-trotter. But his opinions never fluttered or
drooped; he was as impartial to cities, countries and continents as the winds
or gravitation.
And as E. Rushmore Coglan prattled of this little planet I thought with
glee of a great almost-cosmopolite who wrote for the whole world and
dedicated himself to Bombay. In a poem he has to say that there is pride and
rivalry between the cities of the earth, and that “the men that breed from
them, they traffic up and down, but cling to their cities’ hem as a child to
the mother’s gown.” And whenever they walk “by roaring streets unknown”
they remember their native city “most faithful, foolish, fond; making her
mere-breathed name their bond upon their bond.” And my glee was roused
because I had caught Mr. Kipling napping. Here I had found a man not
made from dust; one who had no narrow boasts of birthplace or country,
one who, if he bragged at all, would brag of his whole round globe against
the Martians and the inhabitants of the Moon.
Expression on these subjects was precipitated from E. Rushmore Coglan
by the third corner to our table. While Coglan was describing to me the
topography along the Siberian Railway the orchestra glided into a medley.
The concluding air was “Dixie,” and as the exhilarating notes tumbled forth
they were almost overpowered by a great clapping of hands from almost
every table.
It is worth a paragraph to say that this remarkable scene can be witnessed
every evening in numerous cafés in the City of New York. Tons of brew
have been consumed over theories to account for it. Some have conjectured
hastily that all Southerners in town hie themselves to cafés at nightfall. This
applause of the “rebel” air in a Northern city does puzzle a little; but it is
not insolvable. The war with Spain, many years’ generous mint and
watermelon crops, a few long-shot winners at the New Orleans race-track,
and the brilliant banquets given by the Indiana and Kansas citizens who

compose the North Carolina Society have made the South rather a “fad” in
Manhattan. Your manicure will lisp softly that your left forefinger reminds
her so much of a gentleman’s in Richmond, Va. Oh, certainly; but many a
lady has to work now—the war, you know.
When “Dixie” was being played a dark-haired young man sprang up
from somewhere with a Mosby guerrilla yell and waved frantically his soft-
brimmed hat. Then he strayed through the smoke, dropped into the vacant
chair at our table and pulled out cigarettes.
The evening was at the period when reserve is thawed. One of us
mentioned three Würzburgers to the waiter; the dark-haired young man
acknowledged his inclusion in the order by a smile and a nod. I hastened to
ask him a question because I wanted to try out a theory I had.
“Would you mind telling me,” I began, “whether you are from—”
The fist of E. Rushmore Coglan banged the table and I was jarred into
silence.
“Excuse me,” said he, “but that’s a question I never like to hear asked.
What does it matter where a man is from? Is it fair to judge a man by his
post-office address? Why, I’ve seen Kentuckians who hated whiskey,
Virginians who weren’t descended from Pocahontas, Indianians who hadn’t
written a novel, Mexicans who didn’t wear velvet trousers with silver
dollars sewed along the seams, funny Englishmen, spendthrift Yankees,
cold-blooded Southerners, narrow-minded Westerners, and New Yorkers
who were too busy to stop for an hour on the street to watch a one-armed
grocer’s clerk do up cranberries in paper bags. Let a man be a man and
don’t handicap him with the label of any section.”
“Pardon me,” I said, “but my curiosity was not altogether an idle one. I
know the South, and when the band plays ‘Dixie’ I like to observe. I have
formed the belief that the man who applauds that air with special violence
and ostensible sectional loyalty is invariably a native of either Secaucus,
N.J., or the district between Murray Hill Lyceum and the Harlem River, this
city. I was about to put my opinion to the test by inquiring of this gentleman
when you interrupted with your own—larger theory, I must confess.”
And now the dark-haired young man spoke to me, and it became evident
that his mind also moved along its own set of grooves.

“I should like to be a periwinkle,” said he, mysteriously, “on the top of a
valley, and sing tooralloo-ralloo.”
This was clearly too obscure, so I turned again to Coglan.
“I’ve been around the world twelve times,” said he. “I know an
Esquimau in Upernavik who sends to Cincinnati for his neckties, and I saw
a goat-herder in Uruguay who won a prize in a Battle Creek breakfast food
puzzle competition. I pay rent on a room in Cairo, Egypt, and another in
Yokohama all the year around. I’ve got slippers waiting for me in a tea-
house in Shanghai, and I don’t have to tell ’em how to cook my eggs in Rio
de Janeiro or Seattle. It’s a mighty little old world. What’s the use of
bragging about being from the North, or the South, or the old manor house
in the dale, or Euclid avenue, Cleveland, or Pike’s Peak, or Fairfax County,
Va., or Hooligan’s Flats or any place? It’ll be a better world when we quit
being fools about some mildewed town or ten acres of swampland just
because we happened to be born there.”
“You seem to be a genuine cosmopolite,” I said admiringly. “But it also
seems that you would decry patriotism.”
“A relic of the stone age,” declared Coglan, warmly. “We are all brothers
—Chinamen, Englishmen, Zulus, Patagonians and the people in the bend of
the Kaw River. Some day all this petty pride in one’s city or State or section
or country will be wiped out, and we’ll all be citizens of the world, as we
ought to be.”
“But while you are wandering in foreign lands,” I persisted, “do not your
thoughts revert to some spot—some dear and—”
“Nary a spot,” interrupted E. R. Coglan, flippantly. “The terrestrial,
globular, planetary hunk of matter, slightly flattened at the poles, and
known as the Earth, is my abode. I’ve met a good many object-bound
citizens of this country abroad. I’ve seen men from Chicago sit in a gondola
in Venice on a moonlight night and brag about their drainage canal. I’ve
seen a Southerner on being introduced to the King of England hand that
monarch, without batting his eyes, the information that his grand-aunt on
his mother’s side was related by marriage to the Perkinses, of Charleston. I
knew a New Yorker who was kidnapped for ransom by some Afghanistan
bandits. His people sent over the money and he came back to Kabul with
the agent. ‘Afghanistan?’ the natives said to him through an interpreter.
‘Well, not so slow, do you think?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ says he, and he begins

to tell them about a cab driver at Sixth avenue and Broadway. Those ideas
don’t suit me. I’m not tied down to anything that isn’t 8,000 miles in
diameter. Just put me down as E. Rushmore Coglan, citizen of the terrestrial
sphere.”
My cosmopolite made a large adieu and left me, for he thought he saw
some one through the chatter and smoke whom he knew. So I was left with
the would-be periwinkle, who was reduced to Würzburger without further
ability to voice his aspirations to perch, melodious, upon the summit of a
valley.
I sat reflecting upon my evident cosmopolite and wondering how the poet
had managed to miss him. He was my discovery and I believed in him.
How was it? “The men that breed from them they traffic up and down, but
cling to their cities’ hem as a child to the mother’s gown.”
Not so E. Rushmore Coglan. With the whole world for his—
My meditations were interrupted by a tremendous noise and conflict in
another part of the café. I saw above the heads of the seated patrons E.
Rushmore Coglan and a stranger to me engaged in terrific battle. They
fought between the tables like Titans, and glasses crashed, and men caught
their hats up and were knocked down, and a brunette screamed, and a
blonde began to sing “Teasing.”
My cosmopolite was sustaining the pride and reputation of the Earth
when the waiters closed in on both combatants with their famous flying
wedge formation and bore them outside, still resisting.
I called McCarthy, one of the French garçons, and asked him the cause of
the conflict.
“The man with the red tie” (that was my cosmopolite), said he, “got hot
on account of things said about the bum sidewalks and water supply of the
place he come from by the other guy.”
“Why,” said I, bewildered, “that man is a citizen of the world—a
cosmopolite. He—”
“Originally from Mattawamkeag, Maine, he said,” continued McCarthy,
“and he wouldn’t stand for no knockin’ the place.”

BETWEEN ROUNDS

The May moon shone bright upon the private boarding-house of Mrs.
Murphy. By reference to the almanac a large amount of territory will be
discovered upon which its rays also fell. Spring was in its heydey, with hay
fever soon to follow. The parks were green with new leaves and buyers for
the Western and Southern trade. Flowers and summer-resort agents were
blowing; the air and answers to Lawson were growing milder; hand-organs,
fountains and pinochle were playing everywhere.
The windows of Mrs. Murphy’s boarding-house were open. A group of
boarders were seated on the high stoop upon round, flat mats like German
pancakes.
In one of the second-floor front windows Mrs. McCaskey awaited her
husband. Supper was cooling on the table. Its heat went into Mrs.
McCaskey.
At nine Mr. McCaskey came. He carried his coat on his arm and his pipe
in his teeth; and he apologised for disturbing the boarders on the steps as he
selected spots of stone between them on which to set his size 9, width Ds.
As he opened the door of his room he received a surprise. Instead of the
usual stove-lid or potato-masher for him to dodge, came only words.
Mr. McCaskey reckoned that the benign May moon had softened the
breast of his spouse.
“I heard ye,” came the oral substitutes for kitchenware. “Ye can
apollygise to riff-raff of the streets for settin’ yer unhandy feet on the tails
of their frocks, but ye’d walk on the neck of yer wife the length of a
clothes-line without so much as a ‘Kiss me fut,’ and I’m sure it’s that long
from rubberin’ out the windy for ye and the victuals cold such as there’s
money to buy after drinkin’ up yer wages at Gallegher’s every Saturday
evenin’, and the gas man here twice to-day for his.”

“Woman!” said Mr. McCaskey, dashing his coat and hat upon a chair,
“the noise of ye is an insult to me appetite. When ye run down politeness ye
take the mortar from between the bricks of the foundations of society. ’Tis
no more than exercisin’ the acrimony of a gentleman when ye ask the
dissent of ladies blockin’ the way for steppin’ between them. Will ye bring
the pig’s face of ye out of the windy and see to the food?”
Mrs. McCaskey arose heavily and went to the stove. There was
something in her manner that warned Mr. McCaskey. When the corners of
her mouth went down suddenly like a barometer it usually foretold a fall of
crockery and tinware.
“Pig’s face, is it?” said Mrs. McCaskey, and hurled a stewpan full of
bacon and turnips at her lord.
Mr. McCaskey was no novice at repartee. He knew what should follow
the entrée. On the table was a roast sirloin of pork, garnished with
shamrocks. He retorted with this, and drew the appropriate return of a bread
pudding in an earthen dish. A hunk of Swiss cheese accurately thrown by
her husband struck Mrs. McCaskey below one eye. When she replied with a
well-aimed coffee-pot full of a hot, black, semi-fragrant liquid the battle,
according to courses, should have ended.
But Mr. McCaskey was no 50-cent table d’hôter. Let cheap Bohemians
consider coffee the end, if they would. Let them make that faux pas. He was
foxier still. Finger-bowls were not beyond the compass of his experience.
They were not to be had in the Pension Murphy; but their equivalent was at
hand. Triumphantly he sent the granite-ware wash basin at the head of his
matrimonial adversary. Mrs. McCaskey dodged in time. She reached for a
flatiron, with which, as a sort of cordial, she hoped to bring the
gastronomical duel to a close. But a loud, wailing scream downstairs caused
both her and Mr. McCaskey to pause in a sort of involuntary armistice.
On the sidewalk at the corner of the house Policeman Cleary was
standing with one ear upturned, listening to the crash of household utensils.
“’Tis Jawn McCaskey and his missis at it again,” meditated the
policeman. “I wonder shall I go up and stop the row. I will not. Married
folks they are; and few pleasures they have. ’Twill not last long. Sure,
they’ll have to borrow more dishes to keep it up with.”
And just then came the loud scream below-stairs, betokening fear or dire
extremity. “’Tis probably the cat,” said Policeman Cleary, and walked

hastily in the other direction.
The boarders on the steps were fluttered. Mr. Toomey, an insurance
solicitor by birth and an investigator by profession, went inside to analyse
the scream. He returned with the news that Mrs. Murphy’s little boy, Mike,
was lost. Following the messenger, out bounced Mrs. Murphy—two
hundred pounds in tears and hysterics, clutching the air and howling to the
sky for the loss of thirty pounds of freckles and mischief. Bathos, truly; but
Mr. Toomey sat down at the side of Miss Purdy, millinery, and their hands
came together in sympathy. The two old maids, Misses Walsh, who
complained every day about the noise in the halls, inquired immediately if
anybody had looked behind the clock.
Major Grigg, who sat by his fat wife on the top step, arose and buttoned
his coat. “The little one lost?” he exclaimed. “I will scour the city.” His wife
never allowed him out after dark. But now she said: “Go, Ludovic!” in a
baritone voice. “Whoever can look upon that mother’s grief without
springing to her relief has a heart of stone.” “Give me some thirty or—sixty
cents, my love,” said the Major. “Lost children sometimes stray far. I may
need carfares.”
Old man Denny, hall room, fourth floor back, who sat on the lowest step,
trying to read a paper by the street lamp, turned over a page to follow up the
article about the carpenters’ strike. Mrs. Murphy shrieked to the moon: “Oh,
ar-r-Mike, f’r Gawd’s sake, where is me little bit av a boy?”
“When’d ye see him last?” asked old man Denny, with one eye on the
report of the Building Trades League.
“Oh,” wailed Mrs. Murphy, “’twas yisterday, or maybe four hours ago! I
dunno. But it’s lost he is, me little boy Mike. He was playin’ on the
sidewalk only this mornin’—or was it Wednesday? I’m that busy with
work, ’tis hard to keep up with dates. But I’ve looked the house over from
top to cellar, and it’s gone he is. Oh, for the love av Hiven—”
Silent, grim, colossal, the big city has ever stood against its revilers. They
call it hard as iron; they say that no pulse of pity beats in its bosom; they
compare its streets with lonely forests and deserts of lava. But beneath the
hard crust of the lobster is found a delectable and luscious food. Perhaps a
different simile would have been wiser. Still, nobody should take offence.
We would call no one a lobster without good and sufficient claws.

No calamity so touches the common heart of humanity as does the
straying of a little child. Their feet are so uncertain and feeble; the ways are
so steep and strange.
Major Griggs hurried down to the corner, and up the avenue into Billy’s
place. “Gimme a rye-high,” he said to the servitor. “Haven’t seen a bow-
legged, dirty-faced little devil of a six-year-old lost kid around here
anywhere, have you?”
Mr. Toomey retained Miss Purdy’s hand on the steps. “Think of that dear
little babe,” said Miss Purdy, “lost from his mother’s side—perhaps already
fallen beneath the iron hoofs of galloping steeds—oh, isn’t it dreadful?”
“Ain’t that right?” agreed Mr. Toomey, squeezing her hand. “Say I start
out and help look for um!”
“Perhaps,” said Miss Purdy, “you should. But, oh, Mr. Toomey, you are
so dashing—so reckless—suppose in your enthusiasm some accident
should befall you, then what—”
Old man Denny read on about the arbitration agreement, with one finger
on the lines.
In the second floor front Mr. and Mrs. McCaskey came to the window to
recover their second wind. Mr. McCaskey was scooping turnips out of his
vest with a crooked forefinger, and his lady was wiping an eye that the salt
of the roast pork had not benefited. They heard the outcry below, and thrust
their heads out of the window.
“’Tis little Mike is lost,” said Mrs. McCaskey, in a hushed voice, “the
beautiful, little, trouble-making angel of a gossoon!”
“The bit of a boy mislaid?” said Mr. McCaskey, leaning out of the
window. “Why, now, that’s bad enough, entirely. The childer, they be
different. If ’twas a woman I’d be willin’, for they leave peace behind ’em
when they go.”
Disregarding the thrust, Mrs. McCaskey caught her husband’s arm.
“Jawn,” she said, sentimentally, “Missis Murphy’s little bye is lost. ’Tis a
great city for losing little boys. Six years old he was. Jawn, ’tis the same age
our little bye would have been if we had had one six years ago.”
“We never did,” said Mr. McCaskey, lingering with the fact.

“But if we had, Jawn, think what sorrow would be in our hearts this
night, with our little Phelan run away and stolen in the city nowheres at all.”
“Ye talk foolishness,” said Mr. McCaskey. “’Tis Pat he would be named,
after me old father in Cantrim.”
“Ye lie!” said Mrs. McCaskey, without anger. “Me brother was worth tin
dozen bog-trotting McCaskeys. After him would the bye be named.” She
leaned over the window-sill and looked down at the hurrying and bustle
below.
“Jawn,” said Mrs. McCaskey, softly, “I’m sorry I was hasty wid ye.”
“’Twas hasty puddin’, as ye say,” said her husband, “and hurry-up turnips
and get-a-move-on-ye coffee. ’Twas what ye could call a quick lunch, all
right, and tell no lie.”
Mrs. McCaskey slipped her arm inside her husband’s and took his rough
hand in hers.
“Listen at the cryin’ of poor Mrs. Murphy,” she said. “’Tis an awful thing
for a bit of a bye to be lost in this great big city. If ’twas our little Phelan,
Jawn, I’d be breakin’ me heart.”
Awkwardly Mr. McCaskey withdrew his hand. But he laid it around the
nearing shoulder of his wife.
“’Tis foolishness, of course,” said he, roughly, “but I’d be cut up some
meself if our little Pat was kidnapped or anything. But there never was any
childer for us. Sometimes I’ve been ugly and hard with ye, Judy. Forget it.”
They leaned together, and looked down at the heart-drama being acted
below.
Long they sat thus. People surged along the sidewalk, crowding,
questioning, filling the air with rumours, and inconsequent surmises. Mrs.
Murphy ploughed back and forth in their midst, like a soft mountain down
which plunged an audible cataract of tears. Couriers came and went.
Loud voices and a renewed uproar were raised in front of the boarding-
house.
“What’s up now, Judy?” asked Mr. McCaskey.
“’Tis Missis Murphy’s voice,” said Mrs. McCaskey, harking. “She says
she’s after finding little Mike asleep behind the roll of old linoleum under
the bed in her room.”

Mr. McCaskey laughed loudly.
“That’s yer Phelan,” he shouted, sardonically. “Divil a bit would a Pat
have done that trick. If the bye we never had is strayed and stole, by the
powers, call him Phelan, and see him hide out under the bed like a mangy
pup.”
Mrs. McCaskey arose heavily, and went toward the dish closet, with the
corners of her mouth drawn down.
Policeman Cleary came back around the corner as the crowd dispersed.
Surprised, he upturned an ear toward the McCaskey apartment, where the
crash of irons and chinaware and the ring of hurled kitchen utensils seemed
as loud as before. Policeman Cleary took out his timepiece.
“By the deported snakes!” he exclaimed, “Jawn McCaskey and his lady
have been fightin’ for an hour and a quarter by the watch. The missis could
give him forty pounds weight. Strength to his arm.”
Policeman Cleary strolled back around the corner.
Old man Denny folded his paper and hurried up the steps just as Mrs.
Murphy was about to lock the door for the night.

THE SKYLIGHT ROOM

First Mrs. Parker would show you the double parlours. You would not
dare to interrupt her description of their advantages and of the merits of the
gentleman who had occupied them for eight years. Then you would manage
to stammer forth the confession that you were neither a doctor nor a dentist.
Mrs. Parker’s manner of receiving the admission was such that you could
never afterward entertain the same feeling toward your parents, who had
neglected to train you up in one of the professions that fitted Mrs. Parker’s
parlours.
Next you ascended one flight of stairs and looked at the second-floor-
back at $8. Convinced by her second-floor manner that it was worth the $12
that Mr. Toosenberry always paid for it until he left to take charge of his
brother’s orange plantation in Florida near Palm Beach, where Mrs.
McIntyre always spent the winters that had the double front room with
private bath, you managed to babble that you wanted something still
cheaper.
If you survived Mrs. Parker’s scorn, you were taken to look at Mr.
Skidder’s large hall room on the third floor. Mr. Skidder’s room was not
vacant. He wrote plays and smoked cigarettes in it all day long. But every
room-hunter was made to visit his room to admire the lambrequins. After
each visit, Mr. Skidder, from the fright caused by possible eviction, would
pay something on his rent.
Then—oh, then—if you still stood on one foot, with your hot hand
clutching the three moist dollars in your pocket, and hoarsely proclaimed
your hideous and culpable poverty, nevermore would Mrs. Parker be
cicerone of yours. She would honk loudly the word “Clara,” she would
show you her back, and march downstairs. Then Clara, the coloured maid,
would escort you up the carpeted ladder that served for the fourth flight,
and show you the Skylight Room. It occupied 7×8 feet of floor space at the
middle of the hall. On each side of it was a dark lumber closet or storeroom.

In it was an iron cot, a washstand and a chair. A shelf was the dresser. Its
four bare walls seemed to close in upon you like the sides of a coffin. Your
hand crept to your throat, you gasped, you looked up as from a well—and
breathed once more. Through the glass of the little skylight you saw a
square of blue infinity.
“Two dollars, suh,” Clara would say in her half-contemptuous, half-
Tuskegeenial tones.
One day Miss Leeson came hunting for a room. She carried a typewriter
made to be lugged around by a much larger lady. She was a very little girl,
with eyes and hair that had kept on growing after she had stopped and that
always looked as if they were saying: “Goodness me! Why didn’t you keep
up with us?”
Mrs. Parker showed her the double parlours. “In this closet,” she said,
“one could keep a skeleton or anaesthetic or coal—”
“But I am neither a doctor nor a dentist,” said Miss Leeson, with a shiver.
Mrs. Parker gave her the incredulous, pitying, sneering, icy stare that she
kept for those who failed to qualify as doctors or dentists, and led the way
to the second floor back.
“Eight dollars?” said Miss Leeson. “Dear me! I’m not Hetty if I do look
green. I’m just a poor little working girl. Show me something higher and
lower.”
Mr. Skidder jumped and strewed the floor with cigarette stubs at the rap
on his door.
“Excuse me, Mr. Skidder,” said Mrs. Parker, with her demon’s smile at
his pale looks. “I didn’t know you were in. I asked the lady to have a look at
your lambrequins.”
“They’re too lovely for anything,” said Miss Leeson, smiling in exactly
the way the angels do.
After they had gone Mr. Skidder got very busy erasing the tall, black-
haired heroine from his latest (unproduced) play and inserting a small,
roguish one with heavy, bright hair and vivacious features.
“Anna Held’ll jump at it,” said Mr. Skidder to himself, putting his feet up
against the lambrequins and disappearing in a cloud of smoke like an aerial
cuttlefish.

Presently the tocsin call of “Clara!” sounded to the world the state of
Miss Leeson’s purse. A dark goblin seized her, mounted a Stygian stairway,
thrust her into a vault with a glimmer of light in its top and muttered the
menacing and cabalistic words “Two dollars!”
“I’ll take it!” sighed Miss Leeson, sinking down upon the squeaky iron
bed.
Every day Miss Leeson went out to work. At night she brought home
papers with handwriting on them and made copies with her typewriter.
Sometimes she had no work at night, and then she would sit on the steps of
the high stoop with the other roomers. Miss Leeson was not intended for a
sky-light room when the plans were drawn for her creation. She was gay-
hearted and full of tender, whimsical fancies. Once she let Mr. Skidder read
to her three acts of his great (unpublished) comedy, “It’s No Kid; or, The
Heir of the Subway.”
There was rejoicing among the gentlemen roomers whenever Miss
Leeson had time to sit on the steps for an hour or two. But Miss
Longnecker, the tall blonde who taught in a public school and said, “Well,
really!” to everything you said, sat on the top step and sniffed. And Miss
Dorn, who shot at the moving ducks at Coney every Sunday and worked in
a department store, sat on the bottom step and sniffed. Miss Leeson sat on
the middle step and the men would quickly group around her.
Especially Mr. Skidder, who had cast her in his mind for the star part in a
private, romantic (unspoken) drama in real life. And especially Mr. Hoover,
who was forty-five, fat, flush and foolish. And especially very young Mr.
Evans, who set up a hollow cough to induce her to ask him to leave off
cigarettes. The men voted her “the funniest and jolliest ever,” but the sniffs
on the top step and the lower step were implacable.

I pray you let the drama halt while Chorus stalks to the footlights and
drops an epicedian tear upon the fatness of Mr. Hoover. Tune the pipes to
the tragedy of tallow, the bane of bulk, the calamity of corpulence. Tried
out, Falstaff might have rendered more romance to the ton than would have
Romeo’s rickety ribs to the ounce. A lover may sigh, but he must not puff.
To the train of Momus are the fat men remanded. In vain beats the

faithfullest heart above a 52-inch belt. Avaunt, Hoover! Hoover, forty-five,
flush and foolish, might carry off Helen herself; Hoover, forty-five, flush,
foolish and fat is meat for perdition. There was never a chance for you,
Hoover.
As Mrs. Parker’s roomers sat thus one summer’s evening, Miss Leeson
looked up into the firmament and cried with her little gay laugh:
“Why, there’s Billy Jackson! I can see him from down here, too.”
All looked up—some at the windows of skyscrapers, some casting about
for an airship, Jackson-guided.
“It’s that star,” explained Miss Leeson, pointing with a tiny finger. “Not
the big one that twinkles—the steady blue one near it. I can see it every
night through my skylight. I named it Billy Jackson.”
“Well, really!” said Miss Longnecker. “I didn’t know you were an
astronomer, Miss Leeson.”
“Oh, yes,” said the small star gazer, “I know as much as any of them
about the style of sleeves they’re going to wear next fall in Mars.”
“Well, really!” said Miss Longnecker. “The star you refer to is Gamma,
of the constellation Cassiopeia. It is nearly of the second magnitude, and its
meridian passage is—”
“Oh,” said the very young Mr. Evans, “I think Billy Jackson is a much
better name for it.”
“Same here,” said Mr. Hoover, loudly breathing defiance to Miss
Longnecker. “I think Miss Leeson has just as much right to name stars as
any of those old astrologers had.”
“Well, really!” said Miss Longnecker.
“I wonder whether it’s a shooting star,” remarked Miss Dorn. “I hit nine
ducks and a rabbit out of ten in the gallery at Coney Sunday.”
“He doesn’t show up very well from down here,” said Miss Leeson. “You
ought to see him from my room. You know you can see stars even in the
daytime from the bottom of a well. At night my room is like the shaft of a
coal mine, and it makes Billy Jackson look like the big diamond pin that
Night fastens her kimono with.”
There came a time after that when Miss Leeson brought no formidable
papers home to copy. And when she went out in the morning, instead of

working, she went from office to office and let her heart melt away in the
drip of cold refusals transmitted through insolent office boys. This went on.
There came an evening when she wearily climbed Mrs. Parker’s stoop at
the hour when she always returned from her dinner at the restaurant. But
she had had no dinner.
As she stepped into the hall Mr. Hoover met her and seized his chance.
He asked her to marry him, and his fatness hovered above her like an
avalanche. She dodged, and caught the balustrade. He tried for her hand,
and she raised it and smote him weakly in the face. Step by step she went
up, dragging herself by the railing. She passed Mr. Skidder’s door as he was
red-inking a stage direction for Myrtle Delorme (Miss Leeson) in his
(unaccepted) comedy, to “pirouette across stage from L to the side of the
Count.” Up the carpeted ladder she crawled at last and opened the door of
the skylight room.
She was too weak to light the lamp or to undress. She fell upon the iron
cot, her fragile body scarcely hollowing the worn springs. And in that
Erebus of the skylight room, she slowly raised her heavy eyelids, and
smiled.
For Billy Jackson was shining down on her, calm and bright and constant
through the skylight. There was no world about her. She was sunk in a pit of
blackness, with but that small square of pallid light framing the star that she
had so whimsically and oh, so ineffectually named. Miss Longnecker must
be right; it was Gamma, of the constellation Cassiopeia, and not Billy
Jackson. And yet she could not let it be Gamma.
As she lay on her back she tried twice to raise her arm. The third time she
got two thin fingers to her lips and blew a kiss out of the black pit to Billy
Jackson. Her arm fell back limply.
“Good-bye, Billy,” she murmured faintly. “You’re millions of miles away
and you won’t even twinkle once. But you kept where I could see you most
of the time up there when there wasn’t anything else but darkness to look at,
didn’t you? . . . Millions of miles . . . Good-bye, Billy Jackson.”
Clara, the coloured maid, found the door locked at 10 the next day, and
they forced it open. Vinegar, and the slapping of wrists and burnt feathers
proving of no avail, some one ran to ‘phone for an ambulance.

In due time it backed up to the door with much gong-clanging, and the
capable young medico, in his white linen coat, ready, active, confident, with
his smooth face half debonair, half grim, danced up the steps.
“Ambulance call to 49,” he said briefly. “What’s the trouble?”
“Oh, yes, doctor,” sniffed Mrs. Parker, as though her trouble that there
should be trouble in the house was the greater. “I can’t think what can be
the matter with her. Nothing we could do would bring her to. It’s a young
woman, a Miss Elsie—yes, a Miss Elsie Leeson. Never before in my house
—”
“What room?” cried the doctor in a terrible voice, to which Mrs. Parker
was a stranger.
“The skylight room. It—”
Evidently the ambulance doctor was familiar with the location of skylight
rooms. He was gone up the stairs, four at a time. Mrs. Parker followed
slowly, as her dignity demanded.
On the first landing she met him coming back bearing the astronomer in
his arms. He stopped and let loose the practised scalpel of his tongue, not
loudly. Gradually Mrs. Parker crumpled as a stiff garment that slips down
from a nail. Ever afterward there remained crumples in her mind and body.
Sometimes her curious roomers would ask her what the doctor said to her.
“Let that be,” she would answer. “If I can get forgiveness for having
heard it I will be satisfied.”
The ambulance physician strode with his burden through the pack of
hounds that follow the curiosity chase, and even they fell back along the
sidewalk abashed, for his face was that of one who bears his own dead.
They noticed that he did not lay down upon the bed prepared for it in the
ambulance the form that he carried, and all that he said was: “Drive like
h––––l, Wilson,” to the driver.
That is all. Is it a story? In the next morning’s paper I saw a little news
item, and the last sentence of it may help you (as it helped me) to weld the
incidents together.
It recounted the reception into Bellevue Hospital of a young woman who
had been removed from No. 49 East –––– street, suffering from debility
induced by starvation. It concluded with these words:

“Dr. William Jackson, the ambulance physician who attended the case,
says the patient will recover.”

A SERVICE OF LOVE

When one loves one’s Art no service seems too hard.
That is our premise. This story shall draw a conclusion from it, and show
at the same time that the premise is incorrect. That will be a new thing in
logic, and a feat in story-telling somewhat older than the great wall of
China.
Joe Larrabee came out of the post-oak flats of the Middle West pulsing
with a genius for pictorial art. At six he drew a picture of the town pump
with a prominent citizen passing it hastily. This effort was framed and hung
in the drug store window by the side of the ear of corn with an uneven
number of rows. At twenty he left for New York with a flowing necktie and
a capital tied up somewhat closer.
Delia Caruthers did things in six octaves so promisingly in a pine-tree
village in the South that her relatives chipped in enough in her chip hat for
her to go “North” and “finish.” They could not see her f—, but that is our
story.
Joe and Delia met in an atelier where a number of art and music students
had gathered to discuss chiaroscuro, Wagner, music, Rembrandt’s works,
pictures, Waldteufel, wall paper, Chopin and Oolong.
Joe and Delia became enamoured one of the other, or each of the other, as
you please, and in a short time were married—for (see above), when one
loves one’s Art no service seems too hard.
Mr. and Mrs. Larrabee began housekeeping in a flat. It was a lonesome
flat—something like the A sharp way down at the left-hand end of the
keyboard. And they were happy; for they had their Art, and they had each
other. And my advice to the rich young man would be—sell all thou hast,
and give it to the poor—janitor for the privilege of living in a flat with your
Art and your Delia.

Flat-dwellers shall indorse my dictum that theirs is the only true
happiness. If a home is happy it cannot fit too close—let the dresser
collapse and become a billiard table; let the mantel turn to a rowing
machine, the escritoire to a spare bedchamber, the washstand to an upright
piano; let the four walls come together, if they will, so you and your Delia
are between. But if home be the other kind, let it be wide and long—enter
you at the Golden Gate, hang your hat on Hatteras, your cape on Cape Horn
and go out by the Labrador.
Joe was painting in the class of the great Magister—you know his fame.
His fees are high; his lessons are light—his high-lights have brought him
renown. Delia was studying under Rosenstock—you know his repute as a
disturber of the piano keys.
They were mighty happy as long as their money lasted. So is every—but
I will not be cynical. Their aims were very clear and defined. Joe was to
become capable very soon of turning out pictures that old gentlemen with
thin side-whiskers and thick pocketbooks would sandbag one another in his
studio for the privilege of buying. Delia was to become familiar and then
contemptuous with Music, so that when she saw the orchestra seats and
boxes unsold she could have sore throat and lobster in a private dining-
room and refuse to go on the stage.
But the best, in my opinion, was the home life in the little flat—the
ardent, voluble chats after the day’s study; the cozy dinners and fresh, light
breakfasts; the interchange of ambitions—ambitions interwoven each with
the other’s or else inconsiderable—the mutual help and inspiration; and—
overlook my artlessness—stuffed olives and cheese sandwiches at 11 p.m.
But after a while Art flagged. It sometimes does, even if some switchman
doesn’t flag it. Everything going out and nothing coming in, as the
vulgarians say. Money was lacking to pay Mr. Magister and Herr
Rosenstock their prices. When one loves one’s Art no service seems too
hard. So, Delia said she must give music lessons to keep the chafing dish
bubbling.
For two or three days she went out canvassing for pupils. One evening
she came home elated.
“Joe, dear,” she said, gleefully, “I’ve a pupil. And, oh, the loveliest
people! General—General A. B. Pinkney’s daughter—on Seventy-first
street. Such a splendid house, Joe—you ought to see the front door!

Byzantine I think you would call it. And inside! Oh, Joe, I never saw
anything like it before.
“My pupil is his daughter Clementina. I dearly love her already. She’s a
delicate thing—dresses always in white; and the sweetest, simplest
manners! Only eighteen years old. I’m to give three lessons a week; and,
just think, Joe! $5 a lesson. I don’t mind it a bit; for when I get two or three
more pupils I can resume my lessons with Herr Rosenstock. Now, smooth
out that wrinkle between your brows, dear, and let’s have a nice supper.”
“That’s all right for you, Dele,” said Joe, attacking a can of peas with a
carving knife and a hatchet, “but how about me? Do you think I’m going to
let you hustle for wages while I philander in the regions of high art? Not by
the bones of Benvenuto Cellini! I guess I can sell papers or lay
cobblestones, and bring in a dollar or two.”
Delia came and hung about his neck.
“Joe, dear, you are silly. You must keep on at your studies. It is not as if I
had quit my music and gone to work at something else. While I teach I
learn. I am always with my music. And we can live as happily as
millionaires on $15 a week. You mustn’t think of leaving Mr. Magister.”
“All right,” said Joe, reaching for the blue scalloped vegetable dish. “But
I hate for you to be giving lessons. It isn’t Art. But you’re a trump and a
dear to do it.”
“When one loves one’s Art no service seems too hard,” said Delia.
“Magister praised the sky in that sketch I made in the park,” said Joe.
“And Tinkle gave me permission to hang two of them in his window. I may
sell one if the right kind of a moneyed idiot sees them.”
“I’m sure you will,” said Delia, sweetly. “And now let’s be thankful for
Gen. Pinkney and this veal roast.”
During all of the next week the Larrabees had an early breakfast. Joe was
enthusiastic about some morning-effect sketches he was doing in Central
Park, and Delia packed him off breakfasted, coddled, praised and kissed at
7 o’clock. Art is an engaging mistress. It was most times 7 o’clock when he
returned in the evening.
At the end of the week Delia, sweetly proud but languid, triumphantly
tossed three five-dollar bills on the 8×10 (inches) centre table of the 8×10
(feet) flat parlour.

“Sometimes,” she said, a little wearily, “Clementina tries me. I’m afraid
she doesn’t practise enough, and I have to tell her the same things so often.
And then she always dresses entirely in white, and that does get
monotonous. But Gen. Pinkney is the dearest old man! I wish you could
know him, Joe. He comes in sometimes when I am with Clementina at the
piano—he is a widower, you know—and stands there pulling his white
goatee. ‘And how are the semiquavers and the demisemiquavers
progressing?’ he always asks.
“I wish you could see the wainscoting in that drawing-room, Joe! And
those Astrakhan rug portières. And Clementina has such a funny little
cough. I hope she is stronger than she looks. Oh, I really am getting
attached to her, she is so gentle and high bred. Gen. Pinkney’s brother was
once Minister to Bolivia.”
And then Joe, with the air of a Monte Cristo, drew forth a ten, a five, a
two and a one—all legal tender notes—and laid them beside Delia’s
earnings.
“Sold that watercolour of the obelisk to a man from Peoria,” he
announced overwhelmingly.
“Don’t joke with me,” said Delia, “not from Peoria!”
“All the way. I wish you could see him, Dele. Fat man with a woollen
muffler and a quill toothpick. He saw the sketch in Tinkle’s window and
thought it was a windmill at first. He was game, though, and bought it
anyhow. He ordered another—an oil sketch of the Lackawanna freight
depot—to take back with him. Music lessons! Oh, I guess Art is still in it.”
“I’m so glad you’ve kept on,” said Delia, heartily. “You’re bound to win,
dear. Thirty-three dollars! We never had so much to spend before. We’ll
have oysters to-night.”
“And filet mignon with champignons,” said Joe. “Where is the olive
fork?”
On the next Saturday evening Joe reached home first. He spread his $18
on the parlour table and washed what seemed to be a great deal of dark
paint from his hands.
Half an hour later Delia arrived, her right hand tied up in a shapeless
bundle of wraps and bandages.

“How is this?” asked Joe after the usual greetings. Delia laughed, but not
very joyously.
“Clementina,” she explained, “insisted upon a Welsh rabbit after her
lesson. She is such a queer girl. Welsh rabbits at 5 in the afternoon. The
General was there. You should have seen him run for the chafing dish, Joe,
just as if there wasn’t a servant in the house. I know Clementina isn’t in
good health; she is so nervous. In serving the rabbit she spilled a great lot of
it, boiling hot, over my hand and wrist. It hurt awfully, Joe. And the dear
girl was so sorry! But Gen. Pinkney!—Joe, that old man nearly went
distracted. He rushed downstairs and sent somebody—they said the furnace
man or somebody in the basement—out to a drug store for some oil and
things to bind it up with. It doesn’t hurt so much now.”
“What’s this?” asked Joe, taking the hand tenderly and pulling at some
white strands beneath the bandages.
“It’s something soft,” said Delia, “that had oil on it. Oh, Joe, did you sell
another sketch?” She had seen the money on the table.
“Did I?” said Joe; “just ask the man from Peoria. He got his depot to-day,
and he isn’t sure but he thinks he wants another parkscape and a view on
the Hudson. What time this afternoon did you burn your hand, Dele?”
“Five o’clock, I think,” said Dele, plaintively. “The iron—I mean the
rabbit came off the fire about that time. You ought to have seen Gen.
Pinkney, Joe, when—”
“Sit down here a moment, Dele,” said Joe. He drew her to the couch, sat
beside her and put his arm across her shoulders.
“What have you been doing for the last two weeks, Dele?” he asked.
She braved it for a moment or two with an eye full of love and
stubbornness, and murmured a phrase or two vaguely of Gen. Pinkney; but
at length down went her head and out came the truth and tears.
“I couldn’t get any pupils,” she confessed. “And I couldn’t bear to have
you give up your lessons; and I got a place ironing shirts in that big Twenty-
fourth street laundry. And I think I did very well to make up both General
Pinkney and Clementina, don’t you, Joe? And when a girl in the laundry set
down a hot iron on my hand this afternoon I was all the way home making
up that story about the Welsh rabbit. You’re not angry, are you, Joe? And if I

hadn’t got the work you mightn’t have sold your sketches to that man from
Peoria.”
“He wasn’t from Peoria,” said Joe, slowly.
“Well, it doesn’t matter where he was from. How clever you are, Joe—
and—kiss me, Joe—and what made you ever suspect that I wasn’t giving
music lessons to Clementina?”
“I didn’t,” said Joe, “until to-night. And I wouldn’t have then, only I sent
up this cotton waste and oil from the engine-room this afternoon for a girl
upstairs who had her hand burned with a smoothing-iron. I’ve been firing
the engine in that laundry for the last two weeks.”
“And then you didn’t—”
“My purchaser from Peoria,” said Joe, “and Gen. Pinkney are both
creations of the same art—but you wouldn’t call it either painting or
music.”
And then they both laughed, and Joe began:
“When one loves one’s Art no service seems—”
But Delia stopped him with her hand on his lips. “No,” she said—“just
‘When one loves.’”

THE COMING-OUT OF MAGGIE

Every Saturday night the Clover Leaf Social Club gave a hop in the hall
of the Give and Take Athletic Association on the East Side. In order to
attend one of these dances you must be a member of the Give and Take—or,
if you belong to the division that starts off with the right foot in waltzing,
you must work in Rhinegold’s paper-box factory. Still, any Clover Leaf was
privileged to escort or be escorted by an outsider to a single dance. But
mostly each Give and Take brought the paper-box girl that he affected; and
few strangers could boast of having shaken a foot at the regular hops.
Maggie Toole, on account of her dull eyes, broad mouth and left-handed
style of footwork in the two-step, went to the dances with Anna McCarty
and her “fellow.” Anna and Maggie worked side by side in the factory, and
were the greatest chums ever. So Anna always made Jimmy Burns take her
by Maggie’s house every Saturday night so that her friend could go to the
dance with them.
The Give and Take Athletic Association lived up to its name. The hall of
the association in Orchard street was fitted out with muscle-making
inventions. With the fibres thus builded up the members were wont to
engage the police and rival social and athletic organisations in joyous
combat. Between these more serious occupations the Saturday night hop
with the paper-box factory girls came as a refining influence and as an
efficient screen. For sometimes the tip went ’round, and if you were among
the elect that tiptoed up the dark back stairway you might see as neat and
satisfying a little welter-weight affair to a finish as ever happened inside the
ropes.
On Saturdays Rhinegold’s paper-box factory closed at 3 P. M. On one
such afternoon Anna and Maggie walked homeward together. At Maggie’s
door Anna said, as usual: “Be ready at seven, sharp, Mag; and Jimmy and
me’ll come by for you.”

But what was this? Instead of the customary humble and grateful thanks
from the non-escorted one there was to be perceived a high-poised head, a
prideful dimpling at the corners of a broad mouth, and almost a sparkle in a
dull brown eye.
“Thanks, Anna,” said Maggie; “but you and Jimmy needn’t bother to-
night. I’ve a gentleman friend that’s coming ’round to escort me to the
hop.”
The comely Anna pounced upon her friend, shook her, chided and
beseeched her. Maggie Toole catch a fellow! Plain, dear, loyal, unattractive
Maggie, so sweet as a chum, so unsought for a two-step or a moonlit bench
in the little park. How was it? When did it happen? Who was it?
“You’ll see to-night,” said Maggie, flushed with the wine of the first
grapes she had gathered in Cupid’s vineyard. “He’s swell all right. He’s two
inches taller than Jimmy, and an up-to-date dresser. I’ll introduce him,
Anna, just as soon as we get to the hall.”
Anna and Jimmy were among the first Clover Leafs to arrive that
evening. Anna’s eyes were brightly fixed upon the door of the hall to catch
the first glimpse of her friend’s “catch.”
At 8:30 Miss Toole swept into the hall with her escort. Quickly her
triumphant eye discovered her chum under the wing of her faithful Jimmy.
“Oh, gee!” cried Anna, “Mag ain’t made a hit—oh, no! Swell fellow?
well, I guess! Style? Look at ’um.”
“Go as far as you like,” said Jimmy, with sandpaper in his voice. “Cop
him out if you want him. These new guys always win out with the push.
Don’t mind me. He don’t squeeze all the limes, I guess. Huh!”
“Shut up, Jimmy. You know what I mean. I’m glad for Mag. First fellow
she ever had. Oh, here they come.”
Across the floor Maggie sailed like a coquettish yacht convoyed by a
stately cruiser. And truly, her companion justified the encomiums of the
faithful chum. He stood two inches taller than the average Give and Take
athlete; his dark hair curled; his eyes and his teeth flashed whenever he
bestowed his frequent smiles. The young men of the Clover Leaf Club
pinned not their faith to the graces of person as much as they did to its
prowess, its achievements in hand-to-hand conflicts, and its preservation
from the legal duress that constantly menaced it. The member of the

association who would bind a paper-box maiden to his conquering chariot
scorned to employ Beau Brummel airs. They were not considered
honourable methods of warfare. The swelling biceps, the coat straining at
its buttons over the chest, the air of conscious conviction of the
supereminence of the male in the cosmogony of creation, even a calm
display of bow legs as subduing and enchanting agents in the gentle
tourneys of Cupid—these were the approved arms and ammunition of the
Clover Leaf gallants. They viewed, then, genuflexions and alluring poses of
this visitor with their chins at a new angle.
“A friend of mine, Mr. Terry O’Sullivan,” was Maggie’s formula of
introduction. She led him around the room, presenting him to each new-
arriving Clover Leaf. Almost was she pretty now, with the unique
luminosity in her eyes that comes to a girl with her first suitor and a kitten
with its first mouse.
“Maggie Toole’s got a fellow at last,” was the word that went round
among the paper-box girls. “Pipe Mag’s floor-walker”—thus the Give and
Takes expressed their indifferent contempt.
Usually at the weekly hops Maggie kept a spot on the wall warm with her
back. She felt and showed so much gratitude whenever a self-sacrificing
partner invited her to dance that his pleasure was cheapened and
diminished. She had even grown used to noticing Anna joggle the reluctant
Jimmy with her elbow as a signal for him to invite her chum to walk over
his feet through a two-step.
But to-night the pumpkin had turned to a coach and six. Terry O’Sullivan
was a victorious Prince Charming, and Maggie Toole winged her first
butterfly flight. And though our tropes of fairyland be mixed with those of
entomology they shall not spill one drop of ambrosia from the rose-crowned
melody of Maggie’s one perfect night.
The girls besieged her for introductions to her “fellow.” The Clover Leaf
young men, after two years of blindness, suddenly perceived charms in
Miss Toole. They flexed their compelling muscles before her and bespoke
her for the dance.
Thus she scored; but to Terry O’Sullivan the honours of the evening fell
thick and fast. He shook his curls; he smiled and went easily through the
seven motions for acquiring grace in your own room before an open
window ten minutes each day. He danced like a faun; he introduced manner

and style and atmosphere; his words came trippingly upon his tongue, and
—he waltzed twice in succession with the paper-box girl that Dempsey
Donovan brought.
Dempsey was the leader of the association. He wore a dress suit, and
could chin the bar twice with one hand. He was one of “Big Mike”
O’Sullivan’s lieutenants, and was never troubled by trouble. No cop dared
to arrest him. Whenever he broke a pushcart man’s head or shot a member
of the Heinrick B. Sweeney Outing and Literary Association in the kneecap,
an officer would drop around and say:
“The Cap’n ’d like to see ye a few minutes round to the office whin ye
have time, Dempsey, me boy.”
But there would be sundry gentlemen there with large gold fob chains
and black cigars; and somebody would tell a funny story, and then Dempsey
would go back and work half an hour with the six-pound dumbbells. So,
doing a tight-rope act on a wire stretched across Niagara was a safe
terpsichorean performance compared with waltzing twice with Dempsey
Donovan’s paper-box girl. At 10 o’clock the jolly round face of “Big Mike”
O’Sullivan shone at the door for five minutes upon the scene. He always
looked in for five minutes, smiled at the girls and handed out real perfectos
to the delighted boys.
Dempsey Donovan was at his elbow instantly, talking rapidly. “Big
Mike” looked carefully at the dancers, smiled, shook his head and departed.
The music stopped. The dancers scattered to the chairs along the walls.
Terry O’Sullivan, with his entrancing bow, relinquished a pretty girl in blue
to her partner and started back to find Maggie. Dempsey intercepted him in
the middle of the floor.
Some fine instinct that Rome must have bequeathed to us caused nearly
every one to turn and look at them—there was a subtle feeling that two
gladiators had met in the arena. Two or three Give and Takes with tight coat
sleeves drew nearer.
“One moment, Mr. O’Sullivan,” said Dempsey. “I hope you’re enjoying
yourself. Where did you say you live?”
The two gladiators were well matched. Dempsey had, perhaps, ten
pounds of weight to give away. The O’Sullivan had breadth with quickness.
Dempsey had a glacial eye, a dominating slit of a mouth, an indestructible

jaw, a complexion like a belle’s and the coolness of a champion. The visitor
showed more fire in his contempt and less control over his conspicuous
sneer. They were enemies by the law written when the rocks were molten.
They were each too splendid, too mighty, too incomparable to divide pre-
eminence. One only must survive.
“I live on Grand,” said O’Sullivan, insolently; “and no trouble to find me
at home. Where do you live?”
Dempsey ignored the question.
“You say your name’s O’Sullivan,” he went on. “Well, ‘Big Mike’ says
he never saw you before.”
“Lots of things he never saw,” said the favourite of the hop.
“As a rule,” went on Dempsey, huskily sweet, “O’Sullivans in this
district know one another. You escorted one of our lady members here, and
we want a chance to make good. If you’ve got a family tree let’s see a few
historical O’Sullivan buds come out on it. Or do you want us to dig it out of
you by the roots?”
“Suppose you mind your own business,” suggested O’Sullivan, blandly.
Dempsey’s eye brightened. He held up an inspired forefinger as though a
brilliant idea had struck him.
“I’ve got it now,” he said cordially. “It was just a little mistake. You ain’t
no O’Sullivan. You are a ring-tailed monkey. Excuse us for not recognising
you at first.”
O’Sullivan’s eye flashed. He made a quick movement, but Andy
Geoghan was ready and caught his arm.
Dempsey nodded at Andy and William McMahan, the secretary of the
club, and walked rapidly toward a door at the rear of the hall. Two other
members of the Give and Take Association swiftly joined the little group.
Terry O’Sullivan was now in the hands of the Board of Rules and Social
Referees. They spoke to him briefly and softly, and conducted him out
through the same door at the rear.
This movement on the part of the Clover Leaf members requires a word
of elucidation. Back of the association hall was a smaller room rented by
the club. In this room personal difficulties that arose on the ballroom floor
were settled, man to man, with the weapons of nature, under the supervision

of the board. No lady could say that she had witnessed a fight at a Clover
Leaf hop in several years. Its gentlemen members guaranteed that.
So easily and smoothly had Dempsey and the board done their
preliminary work that many in the hall had not noticed the checking of the
fascinating O’Sullivan’s social triumph. Among these was Maggie. She
looked about for her escort.
“Smoke up!” said Rose Cassidy. “Wasn’t you on? Demps Donovan
picked a scrap with your Lizzie-boy, and they’ve waltzed out to the
slaughter room with him. How’s my hair look done up this way, Mag?”
Maggie laid a hand on the bosom of her cheesecloth waist.
“Gone to fight with Dempsey!” she said, breathlessly. “They’ve got to be
stopped. Dempsey Donovan can’t fight him. Why, he’ll—he’ll kill him!”
“Ah, what do you care?” said Rosa. “Don’t some of ’em fight every
hop?”
But Maggie was off, darting her zig-zag way through the maze of
dancers. She burst through the rear door into the dark hall and then threw
her solid shoulder against the door of the room of single combat. It gave
way, and in the instant that she entered her eye caught the scene—the Board
standing about with open watches; Dempsey Donovan in his shirt sleeves
dancing, light-footed, with the wary grace of the modern pugilist, within
easy reach of his adversary; Terry O’Sullivan standing with arms folded and
a murderous look in his dark eyes. And without slacking the speed of her
entrance she leaped forward with a scream—leaped in time to catch and
hang upon the arm of O’Sullivan that was suddenly uplifted, and to whisk
from it the long, bright stiletto that he had drawn from his bosom.
The knife fell and rang upon the floor. Cold steel drawn in the rooms of
the Give and Take Association! Such a thing had never happened before.
Every one stood motionless for a minute. Andy Geoghan kicked the stiletto
with the toe of his shoe curiously, like an antiquarian who has come upon
some ancient weapon unknown to his learning.
And then O’Sullivan hissed something unintelligible between his teeth.
Dempsey and the board exchanged looks. And then Dempsey looked at
O’Sullivan without anger, as one looks at a stray dog, and nodded his head
in the direction of the door.

“The back stairs, Giuseppi,” he said, briefly. “Somebody’ll pitch your hat
down after you.”
Maggie walked up to Dempsey Donovan. There was a brilliant spot of
red in her cheeks, down which slow tears were running. But she looked him
bravely in the eye.
“I knew it, Dempsey,” she said, as her eyes grew dull even in their tears.
“I knew he was a Guinea. His name’s Tony Spinelli. I hurried in when they
told me you and him was scrappin’. Them Guineas always carries knives.
But you don’t understand, Dempsey. I never had a fellow in my life. I got
tired of comin’ with Anna and Jimmy every night, so I fixed it with him to
call himself O’Sullivan, and brought him along. I knew there’d be nothin’
doin’ for him if he came as a Dago. I guess I’ll resign from the club now.”
Dempsey turned to Andy Geoghan.
“Chuck that cheese slicer out of the window,” he said, “and tell ’em
inside that Mr. O’Sullivan has had a telephone message to go down to
Tammany Hall.”
And then he turned back to Maggie.
“Say, Mag,” he said, “I’ll see you home. And how about next Saturday
night? Will you come to the hop with me if I call around for you?”
It was remarkable how quickly Maggie’s eyes could change from dull to
a shining brown.
“With you, Dempsey?” she stammered. “Say—will a duck swim?”

MAN ABOUT TOWN

There were two or three things that I wanted to know. I do not care about
a mystery. So I began to inquire.
It took me two weeks to find out what women carry in dress suit cases.
And then I began to ask why a mattress is made in two pieces. This serious
query was at first received with suspicion because it sounded like a
conundrum. I was at last assured that its double form of construction was
designed to make lighter the burden of woman, who makes up beds. I was
so foolish as to persist, begging to know why, then, they were not made in
two equal pieces; whereupon I was shunned.
The third draught that I craved from the fount of knowledge was
enlightenment concerning the character known as A Man About Town. He
was more vague in my mind than a type should be. We must have a
concrete idea of anything, even if it be an imaginary idea, before we can
comprehend it. Now, I have a mental picture of John Doe that is as clear as
a steel engraving. His eyes are weak blue; he wears a brown vest and a
shiny black serge coat. He stands always in the sunshine chewing
something; and he keeps half-shutting his pocket knife and opening it again
with his thumb. And, if the Man Higher Up is ever found, take my
assurance for it, he will be a large, pale man with blue wristlets showing
under his cuffs, and he will be sitting to have his shoes polished within
sound of a bowling alley, and there will be somewhere about him
turquoises.
But the canvas of my imagination, when it came to limning the Man
About Town, was blank. I fancied that he had a detachable sneer (like the
smile of the Cheshire cat) and attached cuffs; and that was all. Whereupon I
asked a newspaper reporter about him.
“Why,” said he, “a ‘Man About Town’ is something between a ‘rounder’
and a ‘clubman.’ He isn’t exactly—well, he fits in between Mrs. Fish’s

receptions and private boxing bouts. He doesn’t—well, he doesn’t belong
either to the Lotos Club or to the Jerry McGeogheghan Galvanised Iron
Workers’ Apprentices’ Left Hook Chowder Association. I don’t exactly
know how to describe him to you. You’ll see him everywhere there’s
anything doing. Yes, I suppose he’s a type. Dress clothes every evening;
knows the ropes; calls every policeman and waiter in town by their first
names. No; he never travels with the hydrogen derivatives. You generally
see him alone or with another man.”
My friend the reporter left me, and I wandered further afield. By this time
the 3126 electric lights on the Rialto were alight. People passed, but they
held me not. Paphian eyes rayed upon me, and left me unscathed. Diners,
heimgangers, shop-girls, confidence men, panhandlers, actors,
highwaymen, millionaires and outlanders hurried, skipped, strolled,
sneaked, swaggered and scurried by me; but I took no note of them. I knew
them all; I had read their hearts; they had served. I wanted my Man About
Town. He was a type, and to drop him would be an error—a typograph—
but no! let us continue.
Let us continue with a moral digression. To see a family reading the
Sunday paper gratifies. The sections have been separated. Papa is earnestly
scanning the page that pictures the young lady exercising before an open
window, and bending—but there, there! Mamma is interested in trying to
guess the missing letters in the word N_w Yo_k. The oldest girls are eagerly
perusing the financial reports, for a certain young man remarked last
Sunday night that he had taken a flyer in Q., X. & Z. Willie, the eighteen-
year-old son, who attends the New York public school, is absorbed in the
weekly article describing how to make over an old skirt, for he hopes to
take a prize in sewing on graduation day.
Grandma is holding to the comic supplement with a two-hours’ grip; and
little Tottie, the baby, is rocking along the best she can with the real estate
transfers. This view is intended to be reassuring, for it is desirable that a few
lines of this story be skipped. For it introduces strong drink.
I went into a café to—and while it was being mixed I asked the man who
grabs up your hot Scotch spoon as soon as you lay it down what he
understood by the term, epithet, description, designation, characterisation or
appellation, viz.: a “Man About Town.”

“Why,” said he, carefully, “it means a fly guy that’s wise to the all-night
push—see? It’s a hot sport that you can’t bump to the rail anywhere
between the Flatirons—see? I guess that’s about what it means.”
I thanked him and departed.
On the sidewalk a Salvation lassie shook her contribution receptacle
gently against my waistcoat pocket.
“Would you mind telling me,” I asked her, “if you ever meet with the
character commonly denominated as ‘A Man About Town’ during your
daily wanderings?”
“I think I know whom you mean,” she answered, with a gentle smile.
“We see them in the same places night after night. They are the devil’s body
guard, and if the soldiers of any army are as faithful as they are, their
commanders are well served. We go among them, diverting a few pennies
from their wickedness to the Lord’s service.”
She shook the box again and I dropped a dime into it.
In front of a glittering hotel a friend of mine, a critic, was climbing from
a cab. He seemed at leisure; and I put my question to him. He answered me
conscientiously, as I was sure he would.
“There is a type of ‘Man About Town’ in New York,” he answered. “The
term is quite familiar to me, but I don’t think I was ever called upon to
define the character before. It would be difficult to point you out an exact
specimen. I would say, offhand, that it is a man who had a hopeless case of
the peculiar New York disease of wanting to see and know. At 6 o’clock
each day life begins with him. He follows rigidly the conventions of dress
and manners; but in the business of poking his nose into places where he
does not belong he could give pointers to a civet cat or a jackdaw. He is the
man who has chased Bohemia about the town from rathskeller to roof
garden and from Hester street to Harlem until you can’t find a place in the
city where they don’t cut their spaghetti with a knife. Your ‘Man About
Town’ has done that. He is always on the scent of something new. He is
curiosity, impudence and omnipresence. Hansoms were made for him, and
gold-banded cigars; and the curse of music at dinner. There are not so many
of him; but his minority report is adopted everywhere.
“I’m glad you brought up the subject; I’ve felt the influence of this
nocturnal blight upon our city, but I never thought to analyse it before. I can

see now that your ‘Man About Town’ should have been classified long ago.
In his wake spring up wine agents and cloak models; and the orchestra
plays ‘Let’s All Go Up to Maud’s’ for him, by request, instead of Händel.
He makes his rounds every evening; while you and I see the elephant once a
week. When the cigar store is raided, he winks at the officer, familiar with
his ground, and walks away immune, while you and I search among the
Presidents for names, and among the stars for addresses to give the desk
sergeant.”
My friend, the critic, paused to acquire breath for fresh eloquence. I
seized my advantage.
“You have classified him,” I cried with joy. “You have painted his
portrait in the gallery of city types. But I must meet one face to face. I must
study the Man About Town at first hand. Where shall I find him? How shall
I know him?”
Without seeming to hear me, the critic went on. And his cab-driver was
waiting for his fare, too.
“He is the sublimated essence of Butt-in; the refined, intrinsic extract of
Rubber; the concentrated, purified, irrefutable, unavoidable spirit of
Curiosity and Inquisitiveness. A new sensation is the breath in his nostrils;
when his experience is exhausted he explores new fields with the
indefatigability of a—”
“Excuse me,” I interrupted, “but can you produce one of this type? It is a
new thing to me. I must study it. I will search the town over until I find one.
Its habitat must be here on Broadway.”
“I am about to dine here,” said my friend. “Come inside, and if there is a
Man About Town present I will point him out to you. I know most of the
regular patrons here.”
“I am not dining yet,” I said to him. “You will excuse me. I am going to
find my Man About Town this night if I have to rake New York from the
Battery to Little Coney Island.”
I left the hotel and walked down Broadway. The pursuit of my type gave
a pleasant savour of life and interest to the air I breathed. I was glad to be in
a city so great, so complex and diversified. Leisurely and with something of
an air I strolled along with my heart expanding at the thought that I was a

citizen of great Gotham, a sharer in its magnificence and pleasures, a
partaker in its glory and prestige.
I turned to cross the street. I heard something buzz like a bee, and then I
took a long, pleasant ride with Santos-Dumont.
When I opened my eyes I remembered a smell of gasoline, and I said
aloud: “Hasn’t it passed yet?”
A hospital nurse laid a hand that was not particularly soft upon my brow
that was not at all fevered. A young doctor came along, grinned, and handed
me a morning newspaper.
“Want to see how it happened?” he asked cheerily. I read the article. Its
headlines began where I heard the buzzing leave off the night before. It
closed with these lines:
“—Bellevue Hospital, where it was said that his injuries were not serious.
He appeared to be a typical Man About Town.”

THE COP AND THE ANTHEM

On his bench in Madison Square Soapy moved uneasily. When wild
geese honk high of nights, and when women without sealskin coats grow
kind to their husbands, and when Soapy moves uneasily on his bench in the
park, you may know that winter is near at hand.
A dead leaf fell in Soapy’s lap. That was Jack Frost’s card. Jack is kind to
the regular denizens of Madison Square, and gives fair warning of his
annual call. At the corners of four streets he hands his pasteboard to the
North Wind, footman of the mansion of All Outdoors, so that the
inhabitants thereof may make ready.
Soapy’s mind became cognisant of the fact that the time had come for
him to resolve himself into a singular Committee of Ways and Means to
provide against the coming rigour. And therefore he moved uneasily on his
bench.
The hibernatorial ambitions of Soapy were not of the highest. In them
there were no considerations of Mediterranean cruises, of soporific
Southern skies drifting in the Vesuvian Bay. Three months on the Island was
what his soul craved. Three months of assured board and bed and congenial
company, safe from Boreas and bluecoats, seemed to Soapy the essence of
things desirable.
For years the hospitable Blackwell’s had been his winter quarters. Just as
his more fortunate fellow New Yorkers had bought their tickets to Palm
Beach and the Riviera each winter, so Soapy had made his humble
arrangements for his annual hegira to the Island. And now the time was
come. On the previous night three Sabbath newspapers, distributed beneath
his coat, about his ankles and over his lap, had failed to repulse the cold as
he slept on his bench near the spurting fountain in the ancient square. So the
Island loomed big and timely in Soapy’s mind. He scorned the provisions
made in the name of charity for the city’s dependents. In Soapy’s opinion

the Law was more benign than Philanthropy. There was an endless round of
institutions, municipal and eleemosynary, on which he might set out and
receive lodging and food accordant with the simple life. But to one of
Soapy’s proud spirit the gifts of charity are encumbered. If not in coin you
must pay in humiliation of spirit for every benefit received at the hands of
philanthropy. As Caesar had his Brutus, every bed of charity must have its
toll of a bath, every loaf of bread its compensation of a private and personal
inquisition. Wherefore it is better to be a guest of the law, which though
conducted by rules, does not meddle unduly with a gentleman’s private
affairs.
Soapy, having decided to go to the Island, at once set about
accomplishing his desire. There were many easy ways of doing this. The
pleasantest was to dine luxuriously at some expensive restaurant; and then,
after declaring insolvency, be handed over quietly and without uproar to a
policeman. An accommodating magistrate would do the rest.
Soapy left his bench and strolled out of the square and across the level
sea of asphalt, where Broadway and Fifth Avenue flow together. Up
Broadway he turned, and halted at a glittering café, where are gathered
together nightly the choicest products of the grape, the silkworm and the
protoplasm.
Soapy had confidence in himself from the lowest button of his vest
upward. He was shaven, and his coat was decent and his neat black, ready-
tied four-in-hand had been presented to him by a lady missionary on
Thanksgiving Day. If he could reach a table in the restaurant unsuspected
success would be his. The portion of him that would show above the table
would raise no doubt in the waiter’s mind. A roasted mallard duck, thought
Soapy, would be about the thing—with a bottle of Chablis, and then
Camembert, a demi-tasse and a cigar. One dollar for the cigar would be
enough. The total would not be so high as to call forth any supreme
manifestation of revenge from the café management; and yet the meat
would leave him filled and happy for the journey to his winter refuge.
But as Soapy set foot inside the restaurant door the head waiter’s eye fell
upon his frayed trousers and decadent shoes. Strong and ready hands turned
him about and conveyed him in silence and haste to the sidewalk and
averted the ignoble fate of the menaced mallard.

Soapy turned off Broadway. It seemed that his route to the coveted island
was not to be an epicurean one. Some other way of entering limbo must be
thought of.
At a corner of Sixth Avenue electric lights and cunningly displayed wares
behind plate-glass made a shop window conspicuous. Soapy took a
cobblestone and dashed it through the glass. People came running around
the corner, a policeman in the lead. Soapy stood still, with his hands in his
pockets, and smiled at the sight of brass buttons.
“Where’s the man that done that?” inquired the officer excitedly.
“Don’t you figure out that I might have had something to do with it?”
said Soapy, not without sarcasm, but friendly, as one greets good fortune.
The policeman’s mind refused to accept Soapy even as a clue. Men who
smash windows do not remain to parley with the law’s minions. They take
to their heels. The policeman saw a man half way down the block running
to catch a car. With drawn club he joined in the pursuit. Soapy, with disgust
in his heart, loafed along, twice unsuccessful.
On the opposite side of the street was a restaurant of no great pretensions.
It catered to large appetites and modest purses. Its crockery and atmosphere
were thick; its soup and napery thin. Into this place Soapy took his accusive
shoes and telltale trousers without challenge. At a table he sat and
consumed beefsteak, flapjacks, doughnuts and pie. And then to the waiter
be betrayed the fact that the minutest coin and himself were strangers.
“Now, get busy and call a cop,” said Soapy. “And don’t keep a gentleman
waiting.”
“No cop for youse,” said the waiter, with a voice like butter cakes and an
eye like the cherry in a Manhattan cocktail. “Hey, Con!”
Neatly upon his left ear on the callous pavement two waiters pitched
Soapy. He arose, joint by joint, as a carpenter’s rule opens, and beat the dust
from his clothes. Arrest seemed but a rosy dream. The Island seemed very
far away. A policeman who stood before a drug store two doors away
laughed and walked down the street.
Five blocks Soapy travelled before his courage permitted him to woo
capture again. This time the opportunity presented what he fatuously termed
to himself a “cinch.” A young woman of a modest and pleasing guise was
standing before a show window gazing with sprightly interest at its display

of shaving mugs and inkstands, and two yards from the window a large
policeman of severe demeanour leaned against a water plug.
It was Soapy’s design to assume the role of the despicable and execrated
“masher.” The refined and elegant appearance of his victim and the
contiguity of the conscientious cop encouraged him to believe that he would
soon feel the pleasant official clutch upon his arm that would insure his
winter quarters on the right little, tight little isle.
Soapy straightened the lady missionary’s ready-made tie, dragged his
shrinking cuffs into the open, set his hat at a killing cant and sidled toward
the young woman. He made eyes at her, was taken with sudden coughs and
“hems,” smiled, smirked and went brazenly through the impudent and
contemptible litany of the “masher.” With half an eye Soapy saw that the
policeman was watching him fixedly. The young woman moved away a few
steps, and again bestowed her absorbed attention upon the shaving mugs.
Soapy followed, boldly stepping to her side, raised his hat and said:
“Ah there, Bedelia! Don’t you want to come and play in my yard?”
The policeman was still looking. The persecuted young woman had but
to beckon a finger and Soapy would be practically en route for his insular
haven. Already he imagined he could feel the cozy warmth of the station-
house. The young woman faced him and, stretching out a hand, caught
Soapy’s coat sleeve.
“Sure, Mike,” she said joyfully, “if you’ll blow me to a pail of suds. I’d
have spoke to you sooner, but the cop was watching.”
With the young woman playing the clinging ivy to his oak Soapy walked
past the policeman overcome with gloom. He seemed doomed to liberty.
At the next corner he shook off his companion and ran. He halted in the
district where by night are found the lightest streets, hearts, vows and
librettos. Women in furs and men in greatcoats moved gaily in the wintry
air. A sudden fear seized Soapy that some dreadful enchantment had
rendered him immune to arrest. The thought brought a little of panic upon
it, and when he came upon another policeman lounging grandly in front of a
transplendent theatre he caught at the immediate straw of “disorderly
conduct.”
On the sidewalk Soapy began to yell drunken gibberish at the top of his
harsh voice. He danced, howled, raved and otherwise disturbed the welkin.

The policeman twirled his club, turned his back to Soapy and remarked
to a citizen.
“’Tis one of them Yale lads celebratin’ the goose egg they give to the
Hartford College. Noisy; but no harm. We’ve instructions to lave them be.”
Disconsolate, Soapy ceased his unavailing racket. Would never a
policeman lay hands on him? In his fancy the Island seemed an unattainable
Arcadia. He buttoned his thin coat against the chilling wind.
In a cigar store he saw a well-dressed man lighting a cigar at a swinging
light. His silk umbrella he had set by the door on entering. Soapy stepped
inside, secured the umbrella and sauntered off with it slowly. The man at the
cigar light followed hastily.
“My umbrella,” he said, sternly.
“Oh, is it?” sneered Soapy, adding insult to petit larceny. “Well, why
don’t you call a policeman? I took it. Your umbrella! Why don’t you call a
cop? There stands one on the corner.”
The umbrella owner slowed his steps. Soapy did likewise, with a
presentiment that luck would again run against him. The policeman looked
at the two curiously.
“Of course,” said the umbrella man—“that is—well, you know how these
mistakes occur—I—if it’s your umbrella I hope you’ll excuse me—I picked
it up this morning in a restaurant—If you recognise it as yours, why—I
hope you’ll—”
“Of course it’s mine,” said Soapy, viciously.
The ex-umbrella man retreated. The policeman hurried to assist a tall
blonde in an opera cloak across the street in front of a street car that was
approaching two blocks away.
Soapy walked eastward through a street damaged by improvements. He
hurled the umbrella wrathfully into an excavation. He muttered against the
men who wear helmets and carry clubs. Because he wanted to fall into their
clutches, they seemed to regard him as a king who could do no wrong.
At length Soapy reached one of the avenues to the east where the glitter
and turmoil was but faint. He set his face down this toward Madison
Square, for the homing instinct survives even when the home is a park
bench.

But on an unusually quiet corner Soapy came to a standstill. Here was an
old church, quaint and rambling and gabled. Through one violet-stained
window a soft light glowed, where, no doubt, the organist loitered over the
keys, making sure of his mastery of the coming Sabbath anthem. For there
drifted out to Soapy’s ears sweet music that caught and held him transfixed
against the convolutions of the iron fence.
The moon was above, lustrous and serene; vehicles and pedestrians were
few; sparrows twittered sleepily in the eaves—for a little while the scene
might have been a country churchyard. And the anthem that the organist
played cemented Soapy to the iron fence, for he had known it well in the
days when his life contained such things as mothers and roses and
ambitions and friends and immaculate thoughts and collars.
The conjunction of Soapy’s receptive state of mind and the influences
about the old church wrought a sudden and wonderful change in his soul.
He viewed with swift horror the pit into which he had tumbled, the
degraded days, unworthy desires, dead hopes, wrecked faculties and base
motives that made up his existence.
And also in a moment his heart responded thrillingly to this novel mood.
An instantaneous and strong impulse moved him to battle with his desperate
fate. He would pull himself out of the mire; he would make a man of
himself again; he would conquer the evil that had taken possession of him.
There was time; he was comparatively young yet; he would resurrect his
old eager ambitions and pursue them without faltering. Those solemn but
sweet organ notes had set up a revolution in him. To-morrow he would go
into the roaring downtown district and find work. A fur importer had once
offered him a place as driver. He would find him to-morrow and ask for the
position. He would be somebody in the world. He would—
Soapy felt a hand laid on his arm. He looked quickly around into the
broad face of a policeman.
“What are you doin’ here?” asked the officer.
“Nothin’,” said Soapy.
“Then come along,” said the policeman.
“Three months on the Island,” said the Magistrate in the Police Court the
next morning.

AN ADJUSTMENT OF NATURE

In an art exhibition the other day I saw a painting that had been sold for
$5,000. The painter was a young scrub out of the West named Kraft, who
had a favourite food and a pet theory. His pabulum was an unquenchable
belief in the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature. His theory was fixed
around corned-beef hash with poached egg. There was a story behind the
picture, so I went home and let it drip out of a fountain-pen. The idea of
Kraft—but that is not the beginning of the story.
Three years ago Kraft, Bill Judkins (a poet), and I took our meals at
Cypher’s, on Eighth Avenue. I say “took.” When we had money, Cypher got
it “off of” us, as he expressed it. We had no credit; we went in, called for
food and ate it. We paid or we did not pay. We had confidence in Cypher’s
sullenness and smouldering ferocity. Deep down in his sunless soul he was
either a prince, a fool or an artist. He sat at a worm-eaten desk, covered
with files of waiters’ checks so old that I was sure the bottomest one was for
clams that Hendrik Hudson had eaten and paid for. Cypher had the power,
in common with Napoleon III. and the goggle-eyed perch, of throwing a
film over his eyes, rendering opaque the windows of his soul. Once when
we left him unpaid, with egregious excuses, I looked back and saw him
shaking with inaudible laughter behind his film. Now and then we paid up
back scores.
But the chief thing at Cypher’s was Milly. Milly was a waitress. She was
a grand example of Kraft’s theory of the artistic adjustment of nature. She
belonged, largely, to waiting, as Minerva did to the art of scrapping, or
Venus to the science of serious flirtation. Pedestalled and in bronze she
might have stood with the noblest of her heroic sisters as “Liver-and-Bacon
Enlivening the World.” She belonged to Cypher’s. You expected to see her
colossal figure loom through that reeking blue cloud of smoke from frying
fat just as you expect the Palisades to appear through a drifting Hudson
River fog. There amid the steam of vegetables and the vapours of acres of

“ham and,” the crash of crockery, the clatter of steel, the screaming of
“short orders,” the cries of the hungering and all the horrid tumult of
feeding man, surrounded by swarms of the buzzing winged beasts
bequeathed us by Pharaoh, Milly steered her magnificent way like some
great liner cleaving among the canoes of howling savages.
Our Goddess of Grub was built on lines so majestic that they could be
followed only with awe. Her sleeves were always rolled above her elbows.
She could have taken us three musketeers in her two hands and dropped us
out of the window. She had seen fewer years than any of us, but she was of
such superb Evehood and simplicity that she mothered us from the
beginning. Cypher’s store of eatables she poured out upon us with royal
indifference to price and quantity, as from a cornucopia that knew no
exhaustion. Her voice rang like a great silver bell; her smile was many-
toothed and frequent; she seemed like a yellow sunrise on mountain tops. I
never saw her but I thought of the Yosemite. And yet, somehow, I could
never think of her as existing outside of Cypher’s. There nature had placed
her, and she had taken root and grown mightily. She seemed happy, and
took her few poor dollars on Saturday nights with the flushed pleasure of a
child that receives an unexpected donation.
It was Kraft who first voiced the fear that each of us must have held
latently. It came up apropos, of course, of certain questions of art at which
we were hammering. One of us compared the harmony existing between a
Haydn symphony and pistache ice cream to the exquisite congruity between
Milly and Cypher’s.
“There is a certain fate hanging over Milly,” said Kraft, “and if it
overtakes her she is lost to Cypher’s and to us.”
“She will grow fat?” asked Judkins, fearsomely.
“She will go to night school and become refined?” I ventured anxiously.
“It is this,” said Kraft, punctuating in a puddle of spilled coffee with a
stiff forefinger. “Caesar had his Brutus—the cotton has its bollworm, the
chorus girl has her Pittsburger, the summer boarder has his poison ivy, the
hero has his Carnegie medal, art has its Morgan, the rose has its—”
“Speak,” I interrupted, much perturbed. “You do not think that Milly will
begin to lace?”

“One day,” concluded Kraft, solemnly, “there will come to Cypher’s for a
plate of beans a millionaire lumberman from Wisconsin, and he will marry
Milly.”
“Never!” exclaimed Judkins and I, in horror.
“A lumberman,” repeated Kraft, hoarsely.
“And a millionaire lumberman!” I sighed, despairingly.
“From Wisconsin!” groaned Judkins.
We agreed that the awful fate seemed to menace her. Few things were
less improbable. Milly, like some vast virgin stretch of pine woods, was
made to catch the lumberman’s eye. And well we knew the habits of the
Badgers, once fortune smiled upon them. Straight to New York they hie,
and lay their goods at the feet of the girl who serves them beans in a
beanery. Why, the alphabet itself connives. The Sunday newspaper’s
headliner’s work is cut for him.
“Winsome Waitress Wins Wealthy Wisconsin Woodsman.”
For a while we felt that Milly was on the verge of being lost to us.
It was our love of the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature that
inspired us. We could not give her over to a lumberman, doubly accursed by
wealth and provincialism. We shuddered to think of Milly, with her voice
modulated and her elbows covered, pouring tea in the marble teepee of a
tree murderer. No! In Cypher’s she belonged—in the bacon smoke, the
cabbage perfume, the grand, Wagnerian chorus of hurled ironstone china
and rattling casters.
Our fears must have been prophetic, for on that same evening the
wildwood discharged upon us Milly’s preordained confiscator—our fee to
adjustment and order. But Alaska and not Wisconsin bore the burden of the
visitation.
We were at our supper of beef stew and dried apples when he trotted in as
if on the heels of a dog team, and made one of the mess at our table. With
the freedom of the camps he assaulted our ears and claimed the fellowship
of men lost in the wilds of a hash house. We embraced him as a specimen,
and in three minutes we had all but died for one another as friends.
He was rugged and bearded and wind-dried. He had just come off the
“trail,” he said, at one of the North River ferries. I fancied I could see the
snow dust of Chilcoot yet powdering his shoulders. And then he strewed the

table with the nuggets, stuffed ptarmigans, bead work and seal pelts of the
returned Klondiker, and began to prate to us of his millions.
“Bank drafts for two millions,” was his summing up, “and a thousand a
day piling up from my claims. And now I want some beef stew and canned
peaches. I never got off the train since I mushed out of Seattle, and I’m
hungry. The stuff the niggers feed you on Pullmans don’t count. You
gentlemen order what you want.”
And then Milly loomed up with a thousand dishes on her bare arm—
loomed up big and white and pink and awful as Mount Saint Elias—with a
smile like day breaking in a gulch. And the Klondiker threw down his pelts
and nuggets as dross, and let his jaw fall half-way, and stared at her. You
could almost see the diamond tiaras on Milly’s brow and the hand-
embroidered silk Paris gowns that he meant to buy for her.
At last the bollworm had attacked the cotton—the poison ivy was
reaching out its tendrils to entwine the summer boarder—the millionaire
lumberman, thinly disguised as the Alaskan miner, was about to engulf our
Milly and upset Nature’s adjustment.
Kraft was the first to act. He leaped up and pounded the Klondiker’s
back. “Come out and drink,” he shouted. “Drink first and eat afterward.”
Judkins seized one arm and I the other. Gaily, roaringly, irresistibly, in jolly-
good-fellow style, we dragged him from the restaurant to a café, stuffing his
pockets with his embalmed birds and indigestible nuggets.
There he rumbled a roughly good-humoured protest. “That’s the girl for
my money,” he declared. “She can eat out of my skillet the rest of her life.
Why, I never see such a fine girl. I’m going back there and ask her to marry
me. I guess she won’t want to sling hash any more when she sees the pile of
dust I’ve got.”
“You’ll take another whiskey and milk now,” Kraft persuaded, with
Satan’s smile. “I thought you up-country fellows were better sports.”
Kraft spent his puny store of coin at the bar and then gave Judkins and
me such an appealing look that we went down to the last dime we had in
toasting our guest.
Then, when our ammunition was gone and the Klondiker, still somewhat
sober, began to babble again of Milly, Kraft whispered into his ear such a
polite, barbed insult relating to people who were miserly with their funds,

that the miner crashed down handful after handful of silver and notes,
calling for all the fluids in the world to drown the imputation.
Thus the work was accomplished. With his own guns we drove him from
the field. And then we had him carted to a distant small hotel and put to bed
with his nuggets and baby seal-skins stuffed around him.
“He will never find Cypher’s again,” said Kraft. “He will propose to the
first white apron he sees in a dairy restaurant to-morrow. And Milly—I
mean the Natural Adjustment—is saved!”
And back to Cypher’s went we three, and, finding customers scarce, we
joined hands and did an Indian dance with Milly in the centre.
This, I say, happened three years ago. And about that time a little luck
descended upon us three, and we were enabled to buy costlier and less
wholesome food than Cypher’s. Our paths separated, and I saw Kraft no
more and Judkins seldom.
But, as I said, I saw a painting the other day that was sold for $5,000. The
title was “Boadicea,” and the figure seemed to fill all out-of-doors. But of
all the picture’s admirers who stood before it, I believe I was the only one
who longed for Boadicea to stalk from her frame, bringing me corned-beef
hash with poached egg.
I hurried away to see Kraft. His satanic eyes were the same, his hair was
worse tangled, but his clothes had been made by a tailor.
“I didn’t know,” I said to him.
“We’ve bought a cottage in the Bronx with the money,” said he. “Any
evening at 7.”
“Then,” said I, “when you led us against the lumberman—the—
Klondiker—it wasn’t altogether on account of the Unerring Artistic
Adjustment of Nature?”
“Well, not altogether,” said Kraft, with a grin.

MEMOIRS OF A YELLOW DOG

I don’t suppose it will knock any of you people off your perch to read a
contribution from an animal. Mr. Kipling and a good many others have
demonstrated the fact that animals can express themselves in remunerative
English, and no magazine goes to press nowadays without an animal story
in it, except the old-style monthlies that are still running pictures of Bryan
and the Mont Pélee horror.
But you needn’t look for any stuck-up literature in my piece, such as
Bearoo, the bear, and Snakoo, the snake, and Tammanoo, the tiger, talk in
the jungle books. A yellow dog that’s spent most of his life in a cheap New
York flat, sleeping in a corner on an old sateen underskirt (the one she
spilled port wine on at the Lady Longshoremen’s banquet), mustn’t be
expected to perform any tricks with the art of speech.
I was born a yellow pup; date, locality, pedigree and weight unknown.
The first thing I can recollect, an old woman had me in a basket at
Broadway and Twenty-third trying to sell me to a fat lady. Old Mother
Hubbard was boosting me to beat the band as a genuine Pomeranian-
Hambletonian-Red-Irish-Cochin-China-Stoke-Pogis fox terrier. The fat lady
chased a V around among the samples of gros grain flannelette in her
shopping bag till she cornered it, and gave up. From that moment I was a
pet—a mamma’s own wootsey squidlums. Say, gentle reader, did you ever
have a 200-pound woman breathing a flavour of Camembert cheese and
Peau d’Espagne pick you up and wallop her nose all over you, remarking
all the time in an Emma Eames tone of voice: “Oh, oo’s um oodlum,
doodlum, woodlum, toodlum, bitsy-witsy skoodlums?”
From a pedigreed yellow pup I grew up to be an anonymous yellow cur
looking like a cross between an Angora cat and a box of lemons. But my
mistress never tumbled. She thought that the two primeval pups that Noah
chased into the ark were but a collateral branch of my ancestors. It took two

policemen to keep her from entering me at the Madison Square Garden for
the Siberian bloodhound prize.
I’ll tell you about that flat. The house was the ordinary thing in New
York, paved with Parian marble in the entrance hall and cobblestones above
the first floor. Our flat was three—well, not flights—climbs up. My
mistress rented it unfurnished, and put in the regular things—1903 antique
unholstered parlour set, oil chromo of geishas in a Harlem tea house, rubber
plant and husband.
By Sirius! there was a biped I felt sorry for. He was a little man with
sandy hair and whiskers a good deal like mine. Henpecked?—well, toucans
and flamingoes and pelicans all had their bills in him. He wiped the dishes
and listened to my mistress tell about the cheap, ragged things the lady with
the squirrel-skin coat on the second floor hung out on her line to dry. And
every evening while she was getting supper she made him take me out on
the end of a string for a walk.
If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone they’d never
marry. Laura Lean Jibbey, peanut brittle, a little almond cream on the neck
muscles, dishes unwashed, half an hour’s talk with the iceman, reading a
package of old letters, a couple of pickles and two bottles of malt extract,
one hour peeking through a hole in the window shade into the flat across
the air-shaft—that’s about all there is to it. Twenty minutes before time for
him to come home from work she straightens up the house, fixes her rat so
it won’t show, and gets out a lot of sewing for a ten-minute bluff.
I led a dog’s life in that flat. ‘Most all day I lay there in my corner
watching that fat woman kill time. I slept sometimes and had pipe dreams
about being out chasing cats into basements and growling at old ladies with
black mittens, as a dog was intended to do. Then she would pounce upon
me with a lot of that drivelling poodle palaver and kiss me on the nose—but
what could I do? A dog can’t chew cloves.
I began to feel sorry for Hubby, dog my cats if I didn’t. We looked so
much alike that people noticed it when we went out; so we shook the streets
that Morgan’s cab drives down, and took to climbing the piles of last
December’s snow on the streets where cheap people live.
One evening when we were thus promenading, and I was trying to look
like a prize St. Bernard, and the old man was trying to look like he wouldn’t

have murdered the first organ-grinder he heard play Mendelssohn’s
wedding-march, I looked up at him and said, in my way:
“What are you looking so sour about, you oakum trimmed lobster? She
don’t kiss you. You don’t have to sit on her lap and listen to talk that would
make the book of a musical comedy sound like the maxims of Epictetus.
You ought to be thankful you’re not a dog. Brace up, Benedick, and bid the
blues begone.”
The matrimonial mishap looked down at me with almost canine
intelligence in his face.
“Why, doggie,” says he, “good doggie. You almost look like you could
speak. What is it, doggie—Cats?”
Cats! Could speak!
But, of course, he couldn’t understand. Humans were denied the speech
of animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs
and men can get together is in fiction.
In the flat across the hall from us lived a lady with a black-and-tan terrier.
Her husband strung it and took it out every evening, but he always came
home cheerful and whistling. One day I touched noses with the black-and-
tan in the hall, and I struck him for an elucidation.
“See, here, Wiggle-and-Skip,” I says, “you know that it ain’t the nature of
a real man to play dry nurse to a dog in public. I never saw one leashed to a
bow-wow yet that didn’t look like he’d like to lick every other man that
looked at him. But your boss comes in every day as perky and set up as an
amateur prestidigitator doing the egg trick. How does he do it? Don’t tell
me he likes it.”
“Him?” says the black-and-tan. “Why, he uses Nature’s Own Remedy.
He gets spifflicated. At first when we go out he’s as shy as the man on the
steamer who would rather play pedro when they make ’em all jackpots. By
the time we’ve been in eight saloons he don’t care whether the thing on the
end of his line is a dog or a catfish. I’ve lost two inches of my tail trying to
sidestep those swinging doors.”
The pointer I got from that terrier—vaudeville please copy—set me to
thinking.
One evening about 6 o’clock my mistress ordered him to get busy and do
the ozone act for Lovey. I have concealed it until now, but that is what she

called me. The black-and-tan was called “Tweetness.” I consider that I have
the bulge on him as far as you could chase a rabbit. Still “Lovey” is
something of a nomenclatural tin can on the tail of one’s self respect.
At a quiet place on a safe street I tightened the line of my custodian in
front of an attractive, refined saloon. I made a dead-ahead scramble for the
doors, whining like a dog in the press despatches that lets the family know
that little Alice is bogged while gathering lilies in the brook.
“Why, darn my eyes,” says the old man, with a grin; “darn my eyes if the
saffron-coloured son of a seltzer lemonade ain’t asking me in to take a
drink. Lemme see—how long’s it been since I saved shoe leather by
keeping one foot on the foot-rest? I believe I’ll—”
I knew I had him. Hot Scotches he took, sitting at a table. For an hour he
kept the Campbells coming. I sat by his side rapping for the waiter with my
tail, and eating free lunch such as mamma in her flat never equalled with
her homemade truck bought at a delicatessen store eight minutes before
papa comes home.
When the products of Scotland were all exhausted except the rye bread
the old man unwound me from the table leg and played me outside like a
fisherman plays a salmon. Out there he took off my collar and threw it into
the street.
“Poor doggie,” says he; “good doggie. She shan’t kiss you any more. ’S a
darned shame. Good doggie, go away and get run over by a street car and
be happy.”
I refused to leave. I leaped and frisked around the old man’s legs happy
as a pug on a rug.
“You old flea-headed woodchuck-chaser,” I said to him—“you moon-
baying, rabbit-pointing, egg-stealing old beagle, can’t you see that I don’t
want to leave you? Can’t you see that we’re both Pups in the Wood and the
missis is the cruel uncle after you with the dish towel and me with the flea
liniment and a pink bow to tie on my tail. Why not cut that all out and be
pards forever more?”
Maybe you’ll say he didn’t understand—maybe he didn’t. But he kind of
got a grip on the Hot Scotches, and stood still for a minute, thinking.
“Doggie,” says he, finally, “we don’t live more than a dozen lives on this
earth, and very few of us live to be more than 300. If I ever see that flat any

more I’m a flat, and if you do you’re flatter; and that’s no flattery. I’m
offering 60 to 1 that Westward Ho wins out by the length of a dachshund.”
There was no string, but I frolicked along with my master to the Twenty-
third street ferry. And the cats on the route saw reason to give thanks that
prehensile claws had been given them.
On the Jersey side my master said to a stranger who stood eating a
currant bun:
“Me and my doggie, we are bound for the Rocky Mountains.”
But what pleased me most was when my old man pulled both of my ears
until I howled, and said: “You common, monkey-headed, rat-tailed,
sulphur-coloured son of a door mat, do you know what I’m going to call
you?”
I thought of “Lovey,” and I whined dolefully.
“I’m going to call you ‘Pete,’” says my master; and if I’d had five tails I
couldn’t have done enough wagging to do justice to the occasion.

THE LOVE-PHILTRE OF IKEY SCHOENSTEIN

The Blue Light Drug Store is downtown, between the Bowery and First
Avenue, where the distance between the two streets is the shortest. The Blue
Light does not consider that pharmacy is a thing of bric-a-brac, scent and
ice-cream soda. If you ask it for pain-killer it will not give you a bonbon.
The Blue Light scorns the labour-saving arts of modern pharmacy. It
macerates its opium and percolates its own laudanum and paregoric. To this
day pills are made behind its tall prescription desk—pills rolled out on its
own pill-tile, divided with a spatula, rolled with the finger and thumb,
dusted with calcined magnesia and delivered in little round pasteboard pill-
boxes. The store is on a corner about which coveys of ragged-plumed,
hilarious children play and become candidates for the cough drops and
soothing syrups that wait for them inside.
Ikey Schoenstein was the night clerk of the Blue Light and the friend of
his customers. Thus it is on the East Side, where the heart of pharmacy is
not glacé. There, as it should be, the druggist is a counsellor, a confessor, an
adviser, an able and willing missionary and mentor whose learning is
respected, whose occult wisdom is venerated and whose medicine is often
poured, untasted, into the gutter. Therefore Ikey’s corniform, be-spectacled
nose and narrow, knowledge-bowed figure was well known in the vicinity
of the Blue Light, and his advice and notice were much desired.
Ikey roomed and breakfasted at Mrs. Riddle’s two squares away. Mrs.
Riddle had a daughter named Rosy. The circumlocution has been in vain—
you must have guessed it—Ikey adored Rosy. She tinctured all his thoughts;
she was the compound extract of all that was chemically pure and officinal
—the dispensatory contained nothing equal to her. But Ikey was timid, and
his hopes remained insoluble in the menstruum of his backwardness and
fears. Behind his counter he was a superior being, calmly conscious of
special knowledge and worth; outside he was a weak-kneed, purblind,

motorman-cursed rambler, with ill-fitting clothes stained with chemicals
and smelling of socotrine aloes and valerianate of ammonia.
The fly in Ikey’s ointment (thrice welcome, pat trope!) was Chunk
McGowan.
Mr. McGowan was also striving to catch the bright smiles tossed about
by Rosy. But he was no outfielder as Ikey was; he picked them off the bat.
At the same time he was Ikey’s friend and customer, and often dropped in at
the Blue Light Drug Store to have a bruise painted with iodine or get a cut
rubber-plastered after a pleasant evening spent along the Bowery.
One afternoon McGowan drifted in in his silent, easy way, and sat,
comely, smooth-faced, hard, indomitable, good-natured, upon a stool.
“Ikey,” said he, when his friend had fetched his mortar and sat opposite,
grinding gum benzoin to a powder, “get busy with your ear. It’s drugs for
me if you’ve got the line I need.”
Ikey scanned the countenance of Mr. McGowan for the usual evidences
of conflict, but found none.
“Take your coat off,” he ordered. “I guess already that you have been
stuck in the ribs with a knife. I have many times told you those Dagoes
would do you up.”
Mr. McGowan smiled. “Not them,” he said. “Not any Dagoes. But
you’ve located the diagnosis all right enough—it’s under my coat, near the
ribs. Say! Ikey—Rosy and me are goin’ to run away and get married to-
night.”
Ikey’s left forefinger was doubled over the edge of the mortar, holding it
steady. He gave it a wild rap with the pestle, but felt it not. Meanwhile Mr.
McGowan’s smile faded to a look of perplexed gloom.
“That is,” he continued, “if she keeps in the notion until the time comes.
We’ve been layin’ pipes for the getaway for two weeks. One day she says
she will; the same evenin’ she says nixy. We’ve agreed on to-night, and
Rosy’s stuck to the affirmative this time for two whole days. But it’s five
hours yet till the time, and I’m afraid she’ll stand me up when it comes to
the scratch.”
“You said you wanted drugs,” remarked Ikey.
Mr. McGowan looked ill at ease and harassed—a condition opposed to
his usual line of demeanour. He made a patent-medicine almanac into a roll

and fitted it with unprofitable carefulness about his finger.
“I wouldn’t have this double handicap make a false start to-night for a
million,” he said. “I’ve got a little flat up in Harlem all ready, with
chrysanthemums on the table and a kettle ready to boil. And I’ve engaged a
pulpit pounder to be ready at his house for us at 9.30. It’s got to come off.
And if Rosy don’t change her mind again!”—Mr. McGowan ceased, a prey
to his doubts.
“I don’t see then yet,” said Ikey, shortly, “what makes it that you talk of
drugs, or what I can be doing about it.”
“Old man Riddle don’t like me a little bit,” went on the uneasy suitor,
bent upon marshalling his arguments. “For a week he hasn’t let Rosy step
outside the door with me. If it wasn’t for losin’ a boarder they’d have
bounced me long ago. I’m makin’ $20 a week and she’ll never regret flyin’
the coop with Chunk McGowan.”
“You will excuse me, Chunk,” said Ikey. “I must make a prescription that
is to be called for soon.”
“Say,” said McGowan, looking up suddenly, “say, Ikey, ain’t there a drug
of some kind—some kind of powders that’ll make a girl like you better if
you give ’em to her?”
Ikey’s lip beneath his nose curled with the scorn of superior
enlightenment; but before he could answer, McGowan continued:
“Tim Lacy told me he got some once from a croaker uptown and fed ’em
to his girl in soda water. From the very first dose he was ace-high and
everybody else looked like thirty cents to her. They was married in less than
two weeks.”
Strong and simple was Chunk McGowan. A better reader of men than
Ikey was could have seen that his tough frame was strung upon fine wires.
Like a good general who was about to invade the enemy’s territory he was
seeking to guard every point against possible failure.
“I thought,” went on Chunk hopefully, “that if I had one of them powders
to give Rosy when I see her at supper to-night it might brace her up and
keep her from reneging on the proposition to skip. I guess she don’t need a
mule team to drag her away, but women are better at coaching than they are
at running bases. If the stuff’ll work just for a couple of hours it’ll do the
trick.”

“When is this foolishness of running away to be happening?” asked Ikey.
“Nine o’clock,” said Mr. McGowan. “Supper’s at seven. At eight Rosy
goes to bed with a headache. At nine old Parvenzano lets me through to his
back yard, where there’s a board off Riddle’s fence, next door. I go under
her window and help her down the fire-escape. We’ve got to make it early
on the preacher’s account. It’s all dead easy if Rosy don’t balk when the
flag drops. Can you fix me one of them powders, Ikey?”
Ikey Schoenstein rubbed his nose slowly.
“Chunk,” said he, “it is of drugs of that nature that pharmaceutists must
have much carefulness. To you alone of my acquaintance would I intrust a
powder like that. But for you I shall make it, and you shall see how it makes
Rosy to think of you.”
Ikey went behind the prescription desk. There he crushed to a powder
two soluble tablets, each containing a quarter of a grain of morphia. To
them he added a little sugar of milk to increase the bulk, and folded the
mixture neatly in a white paper. Taken by an adult this powder would insure
several hours of heavy slumber without danger to the sleeper. This he
handed to Chunk McGowan, telling him to administer it in a liquid if
possible, and received the hearty thanks of the backyard Lochinvar.
The subtlety of Ikey’s action becomes apparent upon recital of his
subsequent move. He sent a messenger for Mr. Riddle and disclosed the
plans of Mr. McGowan for eloping with Rosy. Mr. Riddle was a stout man,
brick-dusty of complexion and sudden in action.
“Much obliged,” he said, briefly, to Ikey. “The lazy Irish loafer! My own
room’s just above Rosy’s. I’ll just go up there myself after supper and load
the shot-gun and wait. If he comes in my back yard he’ll go away in a
ambulance instead of a bridal chaise.”
With Rosy held in the clutches of Morpheus for a many-hours deep
slumber, and the bloodthirsty parent waiting, armed and forewarned, Ikey
felt that his rival was close, indeed, upon discomfiture.
All night in the Blue Light Drug Store he waited at his duties for chance
news of the tragedy, but none came.
At eight o’clock in the morning the day clerk arrived and Ikey started
hurriedly for Mrs. Riddle’s to learn the outcome. And, lo! as he stepped out
of the store who but Chunk McGowan sprang from a passing street car and

grasped his hand—Chunk McGowan with a victor’s smile and flushed with
joy.
“Pulled it off,” said Chunk with Elysium in his grin. “Rosy hit the fire-
escape on time to a second, and we was under the wire at the Reverend’s at
9.30¼. She’s up at the flat—she cooked eggs this mornin’ in a blue kimono
—Lord! how lucky I am! You must pace up some day, Ikey, and feed with
us. I’ve got a job down near the bridge, and that’s where I’m heading for
now.”
“The—the—powder?” stammered Ikey.
“Oh, that stuff you gave me!” said Chunk, broadening his grin; “well, it
was this way. I sat down at the supper table last night at Riddle’s, and I
looked at Rosy, and I says to myself, ‘Chunk, if you get the girl get her on
the square—don’t try any hocus-pocus with a thoroughbred like her.’ And I
keeps the paper you give me in my pocket. And then my lamps fall on
another party present, who, I says to myself, is failin’ in a proper affection
toward his comin’ son-in-law, so I watches my chance and dumps that
powder in old man Riddle’s coffee—see?”

MAMMON AND THE ARCHER

Old Anthony Rockwall, retired manufacturer and proprietor of
Rockwall’s Eureka Soap, looked out the library window of his Fifth Avenue
mansion and grinned. His neighbour to the right—the aristocratic clubman,
G. Van Schuylight Suffolk-Jones—came out to his waiting motor-car,
wrinkling a contumelious nostril, as usual, at the Italian renaissance
sculpture of the soap palace’s front elevation.
“Stuck-up old statuette of nothing doing!” commented the ex-Soap King.
“The Eden Musee’ll get that old frozen Nesselrode yet if he don’t watch
out. I’ll have this house painted red, white, and blue next summer and see if
that’ll make his Dutch nose turn up any higher.”
And then Anthony Rockwall, who never cared for bells, went to the door
of his library and shouted “Mike!” in the same voice that had once chipped
off pieces of the welkin on the Kansas prairies.
“Tell my son,” said Anthony to the answering menial, “to come in here
before he leaves the house.”
When young Rockwall entered the library the old man laid aside his
newspaper, looked at him with a kindly grimness on his big, smooth, ruddy
countenance, rumpled his mop of white hair with one hand and rattled the
keys in his pocket with the other.
“Richard,” said Anthony Rockwall, “what do you pay for the soap that
you use?”
Richard, only six months home from college, was startled a little. He had
not yet taken the measure of this sire of his, who was as full of
unexpectednesses as a girl at her first party.
“Six dollars a dozen, I think, dad.”
“And your clothes?”
“I suppose about sixty dollars, as a rule.”

“You’re a gentleman,” said Anthony, decidedly. “I’ve heard of these
young bloods spending $24 a dozen for soap, and going over the hundred
mark for clothes. You’ve got as much money to waste as any of ’em, and
yet you stick to what’s decent and moderate. Now I use the old Eureka—not
only for sentiment, but it’s the purest soap made. Whenever you pay more
than 10 cents a cake for soap you buy bad perfumes and labels. But 50 cents
is doing very well for a young man in your generation, position and
condition. As I said, you’re a gentleman. They say it takes three generations
to make one. They’re off. Money’ll do it as slick as soap grease. It’s made
you one. By hokey! it’s almost made one of me. I’m nearly as impolite and
disagreeable and ill-mannered as these two old Knickerbocker gents on
each side of me that can’t sleep of nights because I bought in between ’em.”
“There are some things that money can’t accomplish,” remarked young
Rockwall, rather gloomily.
“Now, don’t say that,” said old Anthony, shocked. “I bet my money on
money every time. I’ve been through the encyclopaedia down to Y looking
for something you can’t buy with it; and I expect to have to take up the
appendix next week. I’m for money against the field. Tell me something
money won’t buy.”
“For one thing,” answered Richard, rankling a little, “it won’t buy one
into the exclusive circles of society.”
“Oho! won’t it?” thundered the champion of the root of evil. “You tell me
where your exclusive circles would be if the first Astor hadn’t had the
money to pay for his steerage passage over?”
Richard sighed.
“And that’s what I was coming to,” said the old man, less boisterously.
“That’s why I asked you to come in. There’s something going wrong with
you, boy. I’ve been noticing it for two weeks. Out with it. I guess I could
lay my hands on eleven millions within twenty-four hours, besides the real
estate. If it’s your liver, there’s the Rambler down in the bay, coaled, and
ready to steam down to the Bahamas in two days.”
“Not a bad guess, dad; you haven’t missed it far.”
“Ah,” said Anthony, keenly; “what’s her name?”
Richard began to walk up and down the library floor. There was enough
comradeship and sympathy in this crude old father of his to draw his

confidence.
“Why don’t you ask her?” demanded old Anthony. “She’ll jump at you.
You’ve got the money and the looks, and you’re a decent boy. Your hands
are clean. You’ve got no Eureka soap on ’em. You’ve been to college, but
she’ll overlook that.”
“I haven’t had a chance,” said Richard.
“Make one,” said Anthony. “Take her for a walk in the park, or a straw
ride, or walk home with her from church. Chance! Pshaw!”
“You don’t know the social mill, dad. She’s part of the stream that turns
it. Every hour and minute of her time is arranged for days in advance. I
must have that girl, dad, or this town is a blackjack swamp forevermore.
And I can’t write it—I can’t do that.”
“Tut!” said the old man. “Do you mean to tell me that with all the money
I’ve got you can’t get an hour or two of a girl’s time for yourself?”
“I’ve put it off too late. She’s going to sail for Europe at noon day after
to-morrow for a two years’ stay. I’m to see her alone to-morrow evening for
a few minutes. She’s at Larchmont now at her aunt’s. I can’t go there. But
I’m allowed to meet her with a cab at the Grand Central Station to-morrow
evening at the 8.30 train. We drive down Broadway to Wallack’s at a gallop,
where her mother and a box party will be waiting for us in the lobby. Do
you think she would listen to a declaration from me during that six or eight
minutes under those circumstances? No. And what chance would I have in
the theatre or afterward? None. No, dad, this is one tangle that your money
can’t unravel. We can’t buy one minute of time with cash; if we could, rich
people would live longer. There’s no hope of getting a talk with Miss Lantry
before she sails.”
“All right, Richard, my boy,” said old Anthony, cheerfully. “You may run
along down to your club now. I’m glad it ain’t your liver. But don’t forget to
burn a few punk sticks in the joss house to the great god Mazuma from time
to time. You say money won’t buy time? Well, of course, you can’t order
eternity wrapped up and delivered at your residence for a price, but I’ve
seen Father Time get pretty bad stone bruises on his heels when he walked
through the gold diggings.”
That night came Aunt Ellen, gentle, sentimental, wrinkled, sighing,
oppressed by wealth, in to Brother Anthony at his evening paper, and began

discourse on the subject of lovers’ woes.
“He told me all about it,” said brother Anthony, yawning. “I told him my
bank account was at his service. And then he began to knock money. Said
money couldn’t help. Said the rules of society couldn’t be bucked for a yard
by a team of ten-millionaires.”
“Oh, Anthony,” sighed Aunt Ellen, “I wish you would not think so much
of money. Wealth is nothing where a true affection is concerned. Love is
all-powerful. If he only had spoken earlier! She could not have refused our
Richard. But now I fear it is too late. He will have no opportunity to address
her. All your gold cannot bring happiness to your son.”
At eight o’clock the next evening Aunt Ellen took a quaint old gold ring
from a moth-eaten case and gave it to Richard.
“Wear it to-night, nephew,” she begged. “Your mother gave it to me.
Good luck in love she said it brought. She asked me to give it to you when
you had found the one you loved.”
Young Rockwall took the ring reverently and tried it on his smallest
finger. It slipped as far as the second joint and stopped. He took it off and
stuffed it into his vest pocket, after the manner of man. And then he ’phoned
for his cab.
At the station he captured Miss Lantry out of the gadding mob at eight
thirty-two.
“We mustn’t keep mamma and the others waiting,” said she.
“To Wallack’s Theatre as fast as you can drive!” said Richard loyally.
They whirled up Forty-second to Broadway, and then down the white-
starred lane that leads from the soft meadows of sunset to the rocky hills of
morning.
At Thirty-fourth Street young Richard quickly thrust up the trap and
ordered the cabman to stop.
“I’ve dropped a ring,” he apologised, as he climbed out. “It was my
mother’s, and I’d hate to lose it. I won’t detain you a minute—I saw where
it fell.”
In less than a minute he was back in the cab with the ring.
But within that minute a crosstown car had stopped directly in front of
the cab. The cabman tried to pass to the left, but a heavy express wagon cut

him off. He tried the right, and had to back away from a furniture van that
had no business to be there. He tried to back out, but dropped his reins and
swore dutifully. He was blockaded in a tangled mess of vehicles and horses.
One of those street blockades had occurred that sometimes tie up
commerce and movement quite suddenly in the big city.
“Why don’t you drive on?” said Miss Lantry, impatiently. “We’ll be
late.”
Richard stood up in the cab and looked around. He saw a congested flood
of wagons, trucks, cabs, vans and street cars filling the vast space where
Broadway, Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth street cross one another as a
twenty-six inch maiden fills her twenty-two inch girdle. And still from all
the cross streets they were hurrying and rattling toward the converging
point at full speed, and hurling themselves into the struggling mass, locking
wheels and adding their drivers’ imprecations to the clamour. The entire
traffic of Manhattan seemed to have jammed itself around them. The oldest
New Yorker among the thousands of spectators that lined the sidewalks had
not witnessed a street blockade of the proportions of this one.
“I’m very sorry,” said Richard, as he resumed his seat, “but it looks as if
we are stuck. They won’t get this jumble loosened up in an hour. It was my
fault. If I hadn’t dropped the ring we—”
“Let me see the ring,” said Miss Lantry. “Now that it can’t be helped, I
don’t care. I think theatres are stupid, anyway.”
At 11 o’clock that night somebody tapped lightly on Anthony Rockwall’s
door.
“Come in,” shouted Anthony, who was in a red dressing-gown, reading a
book of piratical adventures.
Somebody was Aunt Ellen, looking like a grey-haired angel that had been
left on earth by mistake.
“They’re engaged, Anthony,” she said, softly. “She has promised to
marry our Richard. On their way to the theatre there was a street blockade,
and it was two hours before their cab could get out of it.
“And oh, brother Anthony, don’t ever boast of the power of money again.
A little emblem of true love—a little ring that symbolised unending and
unmercenary affection—was the cause of our Richard finding his
happiness. He dropped it in the street, and got out to recover it. And before

they could continue the blockade occurred. He spoke to his love and won
her there while the cab was hemmed in. Money is dross compared with true
love, Anthony.”
“All right,” said old Anthony. “I’m glad the boy has got what he wanted.
I told him I wouldn’t spare any expense in the matter if—”
“But, brother Anthony, what good could your money have done?”
“Sister,” said Anthony Rockwall. “I’ve got my pirate in a devil of a
scrape. His ship has just been scuttled, and he’s too good a judge of the
value of money to let drown. I wish you would let me go on with this
chapter.”
The story should end here. I wish it would as heartily as you who read it
wish it did. But we must go to the bottom of the well for truth.
The next day a person with red hands and a blue polka-dot necktie, who
called himself Kelly, called at Anthony Rockwall’s house, and was at once
received in the library.
“Well,” said Anthony, reaching for his chequebook, “it was a good bilin’
of soap. Let’s see—you had $5,000 in cash.”
“I paid out $300 more of my own,” said Kelly. “I had to go a little above
the estimate. I got the express wagons and cabs mostly for $5; but the trucks
and two-horse teams mostly raised me to $10. The motormen wanted $10,
and some of the loaded teams $20. The cops struck me hardest—$50 I paid
two, and the rest $20 and $25. But didn’t it work beautiful, Mr. Rockwall?
I’m glad William A. Brady wasn’t onto that little outdoor vehicle mob
scene. I wouldn’t want William to break his heart with jealousy. And never
a rehearsal, either! The boys was on time to the fraction of a second. It was
two hours before a snake could get below Greeley’s statue.”
“Thirteen hundred—there you are, Kelly,” said Anthony, tearing off a
check. “Your thousand, and the $300 you were out. You don’t despise
money, do you, Kelly?”
“Me?” said Kelly. “I can lick the man that invented poverty.”
Anthony called Kelly when he was at the door.
“You didn’t notice,” said he, “anywhere in the tie-up, a kind of a fat boy
without any clothes on shooting arrows around with a bow, did you?”

“Why, no,” said Kelly, mystified. “I didn’t. If he was like you say, maybe
the cops pinched him before I got there.”
“I thought the little rascal wouldn’t be on hand,” chuckled Anthony.
“Good-by, Kelly.”

SPRINGTIME À LA CARTE

It was a day in March.
Never, never begin a story this way when you write one. No opening
could possibly be worse. It is unimaginative, flat, dry and likely to consist
of mere wind. But in this instance it is allowable. For the following
paragraph, which should have inaugurated the narrative, is too wildly
extravagant and preposterous to be flaunted in the face of the reader without
preparation.
Sarah was crying over her bill of fare.
Think of a New York girl shedding tears on the menu card!
To account for this you will be allowed to guess that the lobsters were all
out, or that she had sworn ice-cream off during Lent, or that she had ordered
onions, or that she had just come from a Hackett matinee. And then, all
these theories being wrong, you will please let the story proceed.
The gentleman who announced that the world was an oyster which he
with his sword would open made a larger hit than he deserved. It is not
difficult to open an oyster with a sword. But did you ever notice any one try
to open the terrestrial bivalve with a typewriter? Like to wait for a dozen
raw opened that way?
Sarah had managed to pry apart the shells with her unhandy weapon far
enough to nibble a wee bit at the cold and clammy world within. She knew
no more shorthand than if she had been a graduate in stenography just let
slip upon the world by a business college. So, not being able to stenog, she
could not enter that bright galaxy of office talent. She was a free-lance
typewriter and canvassed for odd jobs of copying.
The most brilliant and crowning feat of Sarah’s battle with the world was
the deal she made with Schulenberg’s Home Restaurant. The restaurant was
next door to the old red brick in which she hall-roomed. One evening after
dining at Schulenberg’s 40-cent, five-course table d’hôte (served as fast as

you throw the five baseballs at the coloured gentleman’s head) Sarah took
away with her the bill of fare. It was written in an almost unreadable script
neither English nor German, and so arranged that if you were not careful
you began with a toothpick and rice pudding and ended with soup and the
day of the week.
The next day Sarah showed Schulenberg a neat card on which the menu
was beautifully typewritten with the viands temptingly marshalled under
their right and proper heads from “hors d’oeuvre” to “not responsible for
overcoats and umbrellas.”
Schulenberg became a naturalised citizen on the spot. Before Sarah left
him she had him willingly committed to an agreement. She was to furnish
typewritten bills of fare for the twenty-one tables in the restaurant—a new
bill for each day’s dinner, and new ones for breakfast and lunch as often as
changes occurred in the food or as neatness required.
In return for this Schulenberg was to send three meals per diem to
Sarah’s hall room by a waiter—an obsequious one if possible—and furnish
her each afternoon with a pencil draft of what Fate had in store for
Schulenberg’s customers on the morrow.
Mutual satisfaction resulted from the agreement. Schulenberg’s patrons
now knew what the food they ate was called even if its nature sometimes
puzzled them. And Sarah had food during a cold, dull winter, which was the
main thing with her.
And then the almanac lied, and said that spring had come. Spring comes
when it comes. The frozen snows of January still lay like adamant in the
crosstown streets. The hand-organs still played “In the Good Old
Summertime,” with their December vivacity and expression. Men began to
make thirty-day notes to buy Easter dresses. Janitors shut off steam. And
when these things happen one may know that the city is still in the clutches
of winter.
One afternoon Sarah shivered in her elegant hall bedroom; “house
heated; scrupulously clean; conveniences; seen to be appreciated.” She had
no work to do except Schulenberg’s menu cards. Sarah sat in her squeaky
willow rocker, and looked out the window. The calendar on the wall kept
crying to her: “Springtime is here, Sarah—springtime is here, I tell you.
Look at me, Sarah, my figures show it. You’ve got a neat figure yourself,

Sarah—a—nice springtime figure—why do you look out the window so
sadly?”
Sarah’s room was at the back of the house. Looking out the window she
could see the windowless rear brick wall of the box factory on the next
street. But the wall was clearest crystal; and Sarah was looking down a
grassy lane shaded with cherry trees and elms and bordered with raspberry
bushes and Cherokee roses.
Spring’s real harbingers are too subtle for the eye and ear. Some must
have the flowering crocus, the wood-starring dogwood, the voice of
bluebird—even so gross a reminder as the farewell handshake of the
retiring buckwheat and oyster before they can welcome the Lady in Green
to their dull bosoms. But to old earth’s choicest kin there come straight,
sweet messages from his newest bride, telling them they shall be no
stepchildren unless they choose to be.
On the previous summer Sarah had gone into the country and loved a
farmer.
(In writing your story never hark back thus. It is bad art, and cripples
interest. Let it march, march.)
Sarah stayed two weeks at Sunnybrook Farm. There she learned to love
old Farmer Franklin’s son Walter. Farmers have been loved and wedded and
turned out to grass in less time. But young Walter Franklin was a modern
agriculturist. He had a telephone in his cow house, and he could figure up
exactly what effect next year’s Canada wheat crop would have on potatoes
planted in the dark of the moon.
It was in this shaded and raspberried lane that Walter had wooed and won
her. And together they had sat and woven a crown of dandelions for her
hair. He had immoderately praised the effect of the yellow blossoms against
her brown tresses; and she had left the chaplet there, and walked back to the
house swinging her straw sailor in her hands.
They were to marry in the spring—at the very first signs of spring, Walter
said. And Sarah came back to the city to pound her typewriter.
A knock at the door dispelled Sarah’s visions of that happy day. A waiter
had brought the rough pencil draft of the Home Restaurant’s next day fare
in old Schulenberg’s angular hand.

Sarah sat down to her typewriter and slipped a card between the rollers.
She was a nimble worker. Generally in an hour and a half the twenty-one
menu cards were written and ready.
To-day there were more changes on the bill of fare than usual. The soups
were lighter; pork was eliminated from the entrées, figuring only with
Russian turnips among the roasts. The gracious spirit of spring pervaded the
entire menu. Lamb, that lately capered on the greening hillsides, was
becoming exploited with the sauce that commemorated its gambols. The
song of the oyster, though not silenced, was dimuendo con amore. The
frying-pan seemed to be held, inactive, behind the beneficent bars of the
broiler. The pie list swelled; the richer puddings had vanished; the sausage,
with his drapery wrapped about him, barely lingered in a pleasant
thanatopsis with the buckwheats and the sweet but doomed maple.
Sarah’s fingers danced like midges above a summer stream. Down
through the courses she worked, giving each item its position according to
its length with an accurate eye. Just above the desserts came the list of
vegetables. Carrots and peas, asparagus on toast, the perennial tomatoes and
corn and succotash, lima beans, cabbage—and then—
Sarah was crying over her bill of fare. Tears from the depths of some
divine despair rose in her heart and gathered to her eyes. Down went her
head on the little typewriter stand; and the keyboard rattled a dry
accompaniment to her moist sobs.
For she had received no letter from Walter in two weeks, and the next
item on the bill of fare was dandelions—dandelions with some kind of egg
—but bother the egg!—dandelions, with whose golden blooms Walter had
crowned her his queen of love and future bride—dandelions, the harbingers
of spring, her sorrow’s crown of sorrow—reminder of her happiest days.
Madam, I dare you to smile until you suffer this test: Let the Marechal
Niel roses that Percy brought you on the night you gave him your heart be
served as a salad with French dressing before your eyes at a Schulenberg
table d’hôte. Had Juliet so seen her love tokens dishonoured the sooner
would she have sought the lethean herbs of the good apothecary.
But what a witch is Spring! Into the great cold city of stone and iron a
message had to be sent. There was none to convey it but the little hardy
courier of the fields with his rough green coat and modest air. He is a true
soldier of fortune, this dent-de-lion—this lion’s tooth, as the French chefs

call him. Flowered, he will assist at love-making, wreathed in my lady’s
nut-brown hair; young and callow and unblossomed, he goes into the
boiling pot and delivers the word of his sovereign mistress.
By and by Sarah forced back her tears. The cards must be written. But,
still in a faint, golden glow from her dandeleonine dream, she fingered the
typewriter keys absently for a little while, with her mind and heart in the
meadow lane with her young farmer. But soon she came swiftly back to the
rock-bound lanes of Manhattan, and the typewriter began to rattle and jump
like a strike-breaker’s motor car.
At 6 o’clock the waiter brought her dinner and carried away the
typewritten bill of fare. When Sarah ate she set aside, with a sigh, the dish
of dandelions with its crowning ovarious accompaniment. As this dark mass
had been transformed from a bright and love-indorsed flower to be an
ignominious vegetable, so had her summer hopes wilted and perished. Love
may, as Shakespeare said, feed on itself: but Sarah could not bring herself to
eat the dandelions that had graced, as ornaments, the first spiritual banquet
of her heart’s true affection.
At 7:30 the couple in the next room began to quarrel: the man in the
room above sought for A on his flute; the gas went a little lower; three coal
wagons started to unload—the only sound of which the phonograph is
jealous; cats on the back fences slowly retreated toward Mukden. By these
signs Sarah knew that it was time for her to read. She got out “The Cloister
and the Hearth,” the best non-selling book of the month, settled her feet on
her trunk, and began to wander with Gerard.
The front door bell rang. The landlady answered it. Sarah left Gerard and
Denys treed by a bear and listened. Oh, yes; you would, just as she did!
And then a strong voice was heard in the hall below, and Sarah jumped
for her door, leaving the book on the floor and the first round easily the
bear’s. You have guessed it. She reached the top of the stairs just as her
farmer came up, three at a jump, and reaped and garnered her, with nothing
left for the gleaners.
“Why haven’t you written—oh, why?” cried Sarah.
“New York is a pretty large town,” said Walter Franklin. “I came in a
week ago to your old address. I found that you went away on a Thursday.
That consoled some; it eliminated the possible Friday bad luck. But it didn’t
prevent my hunting for you with police and otherwise ever since!

“I wrote!” said Sarah, vehemently.
“Never got it!”
“Then how did you find me?”
The young farmer smiled a springtime smile.
“I dropped into that Home Restaurant next door this evening,” said he. “I
don’t care who knows it; I like a dish of some kind of greens at this time of
the year. I ran my eye down that nice typewritten bill of fare looking for
something in that line. When I got below cabbage I turned my chair over
and hollered for the proprietor. He told me where you lived.”
“I remember,” sighed Sarah, happily. “That was dandelions below
cabbage.”
“I’d know that cranky capital W way above the line that your typewriter
makes anywhere in the world,” said Franklin.
“Why, there’s no W in dandelions,” said Sarah, in surprise.
The young man drew the bill of fare from his pocket, and pointed to a
line.
Sarah recognised the first card she had typewritten that afternoon. There
was still the rayed splotch in the upper right-hand corner where a tear had
fallen. But over the spot where one should have read the name of the
meadow plant, the clinging memory of their golden blossoms had allowed
her fingers to strike strange keys.
Between the red cabbage and the stuffed green peppers was the item:
“DEAREST WALTER, WITH HARD-BOILED EGG.”

THE GREEN DOOR

Suppose you should be walking down Broadway after dinner, with ten
minutes allotted to the consummation of your cigar while you are choosing
between a diverting tragedy and something serious in the way of vaudeville.
Suddenly a hand is laid upon your arm. You turn to look into the thrilling
eyes of a beautiful woman, wonderful in diamonds and Russian sables. She
thrusts hurriedly into your hand an extremely hot buttered roll, flashes out a
tiny pair of scissors, snips off the second button of your overcoat,
meaningly ejaculates the one word, “parallelogram!” and swiftly flies down
a cross street, looking back fearfully over her shoulder.
That would be pure adventure. Would you accept it? Not you. You would
flush with embarrassment; you would sheepishly drop the roll and continue
down Broadway, fumbling feebly for the missing button. This you would do
unless you are one of the blessed few in whom the pure spirit of adventure
is not dead.
True adventurers have never been plentiful. They who are set down in
print as such have been mostly business men with newly invented methods.
They have been out after the things they wanted—golden fleeces, holy
grails, lady loves, treasure, crowns and fame. The true adventurer goes forth
aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate. A fine example
was the Prodigal Son—when he started back home.
Half-adventurers—brave and splendid figures—have been numerous.
From the Crusades to the Palisades they have enriched the arts of history
and fiction and the trade of historical fiction. But each of them had a prize
to win, a goal to kick, an axe to grind, a race to run, a new thrust in tierce to
deliver, a name to carve, a crow to pick—so they were not followers of true
adventure.
In the big city the twin spirits Romance and Adventure are always abroad
seeking worthy wooers. As we roam the streets they slyly peep at us and

challenge us in twenty different guises. Without knowing why, we look up
suddenly to see in a window a face that seems to belong to our gallery of
intimate portraits; in a sleeping thoroughfare we hear a cry of agony and
fear coming from an empty and shuttered house; instead of at our familiar
curb, a cab-driver deposits us before a strange door, which one, with a
smile, opens for us and bids us enter; a slip of paper, written upon, flutters
down to our feet from the high lattices of Chance; we exchange glances of
instantaneous hate, affection and fear with hurrying strangers in the passing
crowds; a sudden douse of rain—and our umbrella may be sheltering the
daughter of the Full Moon and first cousin of the Sidereal System; at every
corner handkerchiefs drop, fingers beckon, eyes besiege, and the lost, the
lonely, the rapturous, the mysterious, the perilous, changing clues of
adventure are slipped into our fingers. But few of us are willing to hold and
follow them. We are grown stiff with the ramrod of convention down our
backs. We pass on; and some day we come, at the end of a very dull life, to
reflect that our romance has been a pallid thing of a marriage or two, a satin
rosette kept in a safe-deposit drawer, and a lifelong feud with a steam
radiator.
Rudolf Steiner was a true adventurer. Few were the evenings on which he
did not go forth from his hall bedchamber in search of the unexpected and
the egregious. The most interesting thing in life seemed to him to be what
might lie just around the next corner. Sometimes his willingness to tempt
fate led him into strange paths. Twice he had spent the night in a station-
house; again and again he had found himself the dupe of ingenious and
mercenary tricksters; his watch and money had been the price of one
flattering allurement. But with undiminished ardour he picked up every
glove cast before him into the merry lists of adventure.
One evening Rudolf was strolling along a crosstown street in the older
central part of the city. Two streams of people filled the sidewalks—the
home-hurrying, and that restless contingent that abandons home for the
specious welcome of the thousand-candle-power table d’hôte.
The young adventurer was of pleasing presence, and moved serenely and
watchfully. By daylight he was a salesman in a piano store. He wore his tie
drawn through a topaz ring instead of fastened with a stick pin; and once he
had written to the editor of a magazine that “Junie’s Love Test” by Miss
Libbey, had been the book that had most influenced his life.

During his walk a violent chattering of teeth in a glass case on the
sidewalk seemed at first to draw his attention (with a qualm), to a restaurant
before which it was set; but a second glance revealed the electric letters of a
dentist’s sign high above the next door. A giant negro, fantastically dressed
in a red embroidered coat, yellow trousers and a military cap, discreetly
distributed cards to those of the passing crowd who consented to take them.
This mode of dentistic advertising was a common sight to Rudolf.
Usually he passed the dispenser of the dentist’s cards without reducing his
store; but tonight the African slipped one into his hand so deftly that he
retained it there smiling a little at the successful feat.
When he had travelled a few yards further he glanced at the card
indifferently. Surprised, he turned it over and looked again with interest.
One side of the card was blank; on the other was written in ink three words,
“The Green Door.” And then Rudolf saw, three steps in front of him, a man
throw down the card the negro had given him as he passed. Rudolf picked it
up. It was printed with the dentist’s name and address and the usual
schedule of “plate work” and “bridge work” and “crowns,” and specious
promises of “painless” operations.
The adventurous piano salesman halted at the corner and considered.
Then he crossed the street, walked down a block, recrossed and joined the
upward current of people again. Without seeming to notice the negro as he
passed the second time, he carelessly took the card that was handed him.
Ten steps away he inspected it. In the same handwriting that appeared on
the first card “The Green Door” was inscribed upon it. Three or four cards
were tossed to the pavement by pedestrians both following and leading him.
These fell blank side up. Rudolf turned them over. Every one bore the
printed legend of the dental “parlours.”
Rarely did the arch sprite Adventure need to beckon twice to Rudolf
Steiner, his true follower. But twice it had been done, and the quest was on.
Rudolf walked slowly back to where the giant negro stood by the case of
rattling teeth. This time as he passed he received no card. In spite of his
gaudy and ridiculous garb, the Ethiopian displayed a natural barbaric
dignity as he stood, offering the cards suavely to some, allowing others to
pass unmolested. Every half minute he chanted a harsh, unintelligible
phrase akin to the jabber of car conductors and grand opera. And not only
did he withhold a card this time, but it seemed to Rudolf that he received

from the shining and massive black countenance a look of cold, almost
contemptuous disdain.
The look stung the adventurer. He read in it a silent accusation that he
had been found wanting. Whatever the mysterious written words on the
cards might mean, the black had selected him twice from the throng for
their recipient; and now seemed to have condemned him as deficient in the
wit and spirit to engage the enigma.
Standing aside from the rush, the young man made a rapid estimate of the
building in which he conceived that his adventure must lie. Five stories high
it rose. A small restaurant occupied the basement.
The first floor, now closed, seemed to house millinery or furs. The
second floor, by the winking electric letters, was the dentist’s. Above this a
polyglot babel of signs struggled to indicate the abodes of palmists,
dressmakers, musicians and doctors. Still higher up draped curtains and
milk bottles white on the window sills proclaimed the regions of
domesticity.
After concluding his survey Rudolf walked briskly up the high flight of
stone steps into the house. Up two flights of the carpeted stairway he
continued; and at its top paused. The hallway there was dimly lighted by
two pale jets of gas—one far to his right, the other nearer, to his left. He
looked toward the nearer light and saw, within its wan halo, a green door.
For one moment he hesitated; then he seemed to see the contumelious sneer
of the African juggler of cards; and then he walked straight to the green
door and knocked against it.
Moments like those that passed before his knock was answered measure
the quick breath of true adventure. What might not be behind those green
panels! Gamesters at play; cunning rogues baiting their traps with subtle
skill; beauty in love with courage, and thus planning to be sought by it;
danger, death, love, disappointment, ridicule—any of these might respond
to that temerarious rap.
A faint rustle was heard inside, and the door slowly opened. A girl not yet
twenty stood there, white-faced and tottering. She loosed the knob and
swayed weakly, groping with one hand. Rudolf caught her and laid her on a
faded couch that stood against the wall. He closed the door and took a swift
glance around the room by the light of a flickering gas jet. Neat, but
extreme poverty was the story that he read.

The girl lay still, as if in a faint. Rudolf looked around the room excitedly
for a barrel. People must be rolled upon a barrel who—no, no; that was for
drowned persons. He began to fan her with his hat. That was successful, for
he struck her nose with the brim of his derby and she opened her eyes. And
then the young man saw that hers, indeed, was the one missing face from
his heart’s gallery of intimate portraits. The frank, grey eyes, the little nose,
turning pertly outward; the chestnut hair, curling like the tendrils of a pea
vine, seemed the right end and reward of all his wonderful adventures. But
the face was wofully thin and pale.
The girl looked at him calmly, and then smiled.
“Fainted, didn’t I?” she asked, weakly. “Well, who wouldn’t? You try
going without anything to eat for three days and see!”
“Himmel!” exclaimed Rudolf, jumping up. “Wait till I come back.”
He dashed out the green door and down the stairs. In twenty minutes he
was back again, kicking at the door with his toe for her to open it. With both
arms he hugged an array of wares from the grocery and the restaurant. On
the table he laid them—bread and butter, cold meats, cakes, pies, pickles,
oysters, a roasted chicken, a bottle of milk and one of red-hot tea.
“This is ridiculous,” said Rudolf, blusteringly, “to go without eating. You
must quit making election bets of this kind. Supper is ready.” He helped her
to a chair at the table and asked: “Is there a cup for the tea?” “On the shelf
by the window,” she answered. When he turned again with the cup he saw
her, with eyes shining rapturously, beginning upon a huge Dill pickle that
she had rooted out from the paper bags with a woman’s unerring instinct.
He took it from her, laughingly, and poured the cup full of milk. “Drink that
first” he ordered, “and then you shall have some tea, and then a chicken
wing. If you are very good you shall have a pickle to-morrow. And now, if
you’ll allow me to be your guest we’ll have supper.”
He drew up the other chair. The tea brightened the girl’s eyes and brought
back some of her colour. She began to eat with a sort of dainty ferocity like
some starved wild animal. She seemed to regard the young man’s presence
and the aid he had rendered her as a natural thing—not as though she
undervalued the conventions; but as one whose great stress gave her the
right to put aside the artificial for the human. But gradually, with the return
of strength and comfort, came also a sense of the little conventions that
belong; and she began to tell him her little story. It was one of a thousand

such as the city yawns at every day—the shop girl’s story of insufficient
wages, further reduced by “fines” that go to swell the store’s profits; of time
lost through illness; and then of lost positions, lost hope, and—the knock of
the adventurer upon the green door.
But to Rudolf the history sounded as big as the Iliad or the crisis in
“Junie’s Love Test.”
“To think of you going through all that,” he exclaimed.
“It was something fierce,” said the girl, solemnly.
“And you have no relatives or friends in the city?”
“None whatever.”
“I am all alone in the world, too,” said Rudolf, after a pause.
“I am glad of that,” said the girl, promptly; and somehow it pleased the
young man to hear that she approved of his bereft condition.
Very suddenly her eyelids dropped and she sighed deeply.
“I’m awfully sleepy,” she said, “and I feel so good.”
Then Rudolf rose and took his hat. “I’ll say good-night. A long night’s
sleep will be fine for you.”
He held out his hand, and she took it and said “good-night.” But her eyes
asked a question so eloquently, so frankly and pathetically that he answered
it with words.
“Oh, I’m coming back to-morrow to see how you are getting along. You
can’t get rid of me so easily.”
Then, at the door, as though the way of his coming had been so much less
important than the fact that he had come, she asked: “How did you come to
knock at my door?”
He looked at her for a moment, remembering the cards, and felt a sudden
jealous pain. What if they had fallen into other hands as adventurous as his?
Quickly he decided that she must never know the truth. He would never let
her know that he was aware of the strange expedient to which she had been
driven by her great distress.
“One of our piano tuners lives in this house,” he said. “I knocked at your
door by mistake.”
The last thing he saw in the room before the green door closed was her
smile.

At the head of the stairway he paused and looked curiously about him.
And then he went along the hallway to its other end; and, coming back,
ascended to the floor above and continued his puzzled explorations. Every
door that he found in the house was painted green.
Wondering, he descended to the sidewalk. The fantastic African was still
there. Rudolf confronted him with his two cards in his hand.
“Will you tell me why you gave me these cards and what they mean?” he
asked.
In a broad, good-natured grin the negro exhibited a splendid
advertisement of his master’s profession.
“Dar it is, boss,” he said, pointing down the street. “But I ’spect you is a
little late for de fust act.”
Looking the way he pointed Rudolf saw above the entrance to a theatre
the blazing electric sign of its new play, “The Green Door.”
“I’m informed dat it’s a fust-rate show, sah,” said the negro. “De agent
what represents it pussented me with a dollar, sah, to distribute a few of his
cards along with de doctah’s. May I offer you one of de doctah’s cards,
sah?”
At the corner of the block in which he lived Rudolf stopped for a glass of
beer and a cigar. When he had come out with his lighted weed he buttoned
his coat, pushed back his hat and said, stoutly, to the lamp post on the
corner:
“All the same, I believe it was the hand of Fate that doped out the way
for me to find her.”
Which conclusion, under the circumstances, certainly admits Rudolf
Steiner to the ranks of the true followers of Romance and Adventure.

FROM THE CABBY’S SEAT

The cabby has his point of view. It is more single-minded, perhaps, than
that of a follower of any other calling. From the high, swaying seat of his
hansom he looks upon his fellow-men as nomadic particles, of no account
except when possessed of migratory desires. He is Jehu, and you are goods
in transit. Be you President or vagabond, to cabby you are only a Fare, he
takes you up, cracks his whip, joggles your vertebrae and sets you down.
When time for payment arrives, if you exhibit a familiarity with legal
rates you come to know what contempt is; if you find that you have left
your pocketbook behind you are made to realise the mildness of Dante’s
imagination.
It is not an extravagant theory that the cabby’s singleness of purpose and
concentrated view of life are the results of the hansom’s peculiar
construction. The cock-of-the-roost sits aloft like Jupiter on an unsharable
seat, holding your fate between two thongs of inconstant leather. Helpless,
ridiculous, confined, bobbing like a toy mandarin, you sit like a rat in a trap
—you, before whom butlers cringe on solid land—and must squeak upward
through a slit in your peripatetic sarcophagus to make your feeble wishes
known.
Then, in a cab, you are not even an occupant; you are contents. You are a
cargo at sea, and the “cherub that sits up aloft” has Davy Jones’s street and
number by heart.
One night there were sounds of revelry in the big brick tenement-house
next door but one to McGary’s Family Café. The sounds seemed to emanate
from the apartments of the Walsh family. The sidewalk was obstructed by
an assortment of interested neighbours, who opened a lane from time to
time for a hurrying messenger bearing from McGary’s goods pertinent to
festivity and diversion. The sidewalk contingent was engaged in comment

and discussion from which it made no effort to eliminate the news that
Norah Walsh was being married.
In the fulness of time there was an eruption of the merry-makers to the
sidewalk. The uninvited guests enveloped and permeated them, and upon
the night air rose joyous cries, congratulations, laughter and unclassified
noises born of McGary’s oblations to the hymeneal scene.
Close to the curb stood Jerry O’Donovan’s cab. Night-hawk was Jerry
called; but no more lustrous or cleaner hansom than his ever closed its
doors upon point lace and November violets. And Jerry’s horse! I am within
bounds when I tell you that he was stuffed with oats until one of those old
ladies who leave their dishes unwashed at home and go about having
expressmen arrested, would have smiled—yes, smiled—to have seen him.
Among the shifting, sonorous, pulsing crowd glimpses could be had of
Jerry’s high hat, battered by the winds and rains of many years; of his nose
like a carrot, battered by the frolicsome, athletic progeny of millionaires and
by contumacious fares; of his brass-buttoned green coat, admired in the
vicinity of McGary’s. It was plain that Jerry had usurped the functions of
his cab, and was carrying a “load.” Indeed, the figure may be extended and
he be likened to a bread-waggon if we admit the testimony of a youthful
spectator, who was heard to remark “Jerry has got a bun.”
From somewhere among the throng in the street or else out of the thin
stream of pedestrians a young woman tripped and stood by the cab. The
professional hawk’s eye of Jerry caught the movement. He made a lurch for
the cab, overturning three or four onlookers and himself—no! he caught the
cap of a water-plug and kept his feet. Like a sailor shinning up the ratlins
during a squall Jerry mounted to his professional seat. Once he was there
McGary’s liquids were baffled. He seesawed on the mizzenmast of his craft
as safe as a Steeple Jack rigged to the flagpole of a skyscraper.
“Step in, lady,” said Jerry, gathering his lines. The young woman stepped
into the cab; the doors shut with a bang; Jerry’s whip cracked in the air; the
crowd in the gutter scattered, and the fine hansom dashed away ’crosstown.
When the oat-spry horse had hedged a little his first spurt of speed Jerry
broke the lid of his cab and called down through the aperture in the voice of
a cracked megaphone, trying to please:
“Where, now, will ye be drivin’ to?”

“Anywhere you please,” came up the answer, musical and contented.
“’Tis drivin’ for pleasure she is,” thought Jerry. And then he suggested as
a matter of course:
“Take a thrip around in the park, lady. ’Twill be ilegant cool and fine.”
“Just as you like,” answered the fare, pleasantly.
The cab headed for Fifth avenue and sped up that perfect street. Jerry
bounced and swayed in his seat. The potent fluids of McGary were
disquieted and they sent new fumes to his head. He sang an ancient song of
Killisnook and brandished his whip like a baton.
Inside the cab the fare sat up straight on the cushions, looking to right
and left at the lights and houses. Even in the shadowed hansom her eyes
shone like stars at twilight.
When they reached Fifty-ninth street Jerry’s head was bobbing and his
reins were slack. But his horse turned in through the park gate and began
the old familiar nocturnal round. And then the fare leaned back, entranced,
and breathed deep the clean, wholesome odours of grass and leaf and
bloom. And the wise beast in the shafts, knowing his ground, struck into his
by-the-hour gait and kept to the right of the road.
Habit also struggled successfully against Jerry’s increasing torpor. He
raised the hatch of his storm-tossed vessel and made the inquiry that
cabbies do make in the park.
“Like shtop at the Cas-sino, lady? Gezzer r’freshm’s, ’n lish’n the music.
Ev’body shtops.”
“I think that would be nice,” said the fare.
They reined up with a plunge at the Casino entrance. The cab doors flew
open. The fare stepped directly upon the floor. At once she was caught in a
web of ravishing music and dazzled by a panorama of lights and colours.
Some one slipped a little square card into her hand on which was printed a
number—34. She looked around and saw her cab twenty yards away
already lining up in its place among the waiting mass of carriages, cabs and
motor cars. And then a man who seemed to be all shirt-front danced
backward before her; and next she was seated at a little table by a railing
over which climbed a jessamine vine.
There seemed to be a wordless invitation to purchase; she consulted a
collection of small coins in a thin purse, and received from them license to

order a glass of beer. There she sat, inhaling and absorbing it all—the new-
coloured, new-shaped life in a fairy palace in an enchanted wood.
At fifty tables sat princes and queens clad in all the silks and gems of the
world. And now and then one of them would look curiously at Jerry’s fare.
They saw a plain figure dressed in a pink silk of the kind that is tempered
by the word “foulard,” and a plain face that wore a look of love of life that
the queens envied.
Twice the long hands of the clocks went round, Royalties thinned from
their al fresco thrones, and buzzed or clattered away in their vehicles of
state. The music retired into cases of wood and bags of leather and baize.
Waiters removed cloths pointedly near the plain figure sitting almost alone.
Jerry’s fare rose, and held out her numbered card simply:
“Is there anything coming on the ticket?” she asked.
A waiter told her it was her cab check, and that she should give it to the
man at the entrance. This man took it, and called the number. Only three
hansoms stood in line. The driver of one of them went and routed out Jerry
asleep in his cab. He swore deeply, climbed to the captain’s bridge and
steered his craft to the pier. His fare entered, and the cab whirled into the
cool fastnesses of the park along the shortest homeward cuts.
At the gate a glimmer of reason in the form of sudden suspicion seized
upon Jerry’s beclouded mind. One or two things occurred to him. He
stopped his horse, raised the trap and dropped his phonographic voice, like
a lead plummet, through the aperture:
“I want to see four dollars before goin’ any further on th’ thrip. Have ye
got th’ dough?”
“Four dollars!” laughed the fare, softly, “dear me, no. I’ve only got a few
pennies and a dime or two.”
Jerry shut down the trap and slashed his oat-fed horse. The clatter of
hoofs strangled but could not drown the sound of his profanity. He shouted
choking and gurgling curses at the starry heavens; he cut viciously with his
whip at passing vehicles; he scattered fierce and ever-changing oaths and
imprecations along the streets, so that a late truck driver, crawling
homeward, heard and was abashed. But he knew his recourse, and made for
it at a gallop.

At the house with the green lights beside the steps he pulled up. He flung
wide the cab doors and tumbled heavily to the ground.
“Come on, you,” he said, roughly.
His fare came forth with the Casino dreamy smile still on her plain face.
Jerry took her by the arm and led her into the police station. A gray-
moustached sergeant looked keenly across the desk. He and the cabby were
no strangers.
“Sargeant,” began Jerry in his old raucous, martyred, thunderous tones of
complaint. “I’ve got a fare here that—”
Jerry paused. He drew a knotted, red hand across his brow. The fog set up
by McGary was beginning to clear away.
“A fare, sargeant,” he continued, with a grin, “that I want to inthroduce to
ye. It’s me wife that I married at ould man Walsh’s this avening. And a divil
of a time we had, ’tis thrue. Shake hands wid th’ sargeant, Norah, and we’ll
be off to home.”
Before stepping into the cab Norah sighed profoundly.
“I’ve had such a nice time, Jerry,” said she.

AN UNFINISHED STORY

We no longer groan and heap ashes upon our heads when the flames of
Tophet are mentioned. For, even the preachers have begun to tell us that
God is radium, or ether or some scientific compound, and that the worst we
wicked ones may expect is a chemical reaction. This is a pleasing
hypothesis; but there lingers yet some of the old, goodly terror of
orthodoxy.
There are but two subjects upon which one may discourse with a free
imagination, and without the possibility of being controverted. You may
talk of your dreams; and you may tell what you heard a parrot say. Both
Morpheus and the bird are incompetent witnesses; and your listener dare
not attack your recital. The baseless fabric of a vision, then, shall furnish
my theme—chosen with apologies and regrets instead of the more limited
field of pretty Polly’s small talk.
I had a dream that was so far removed from the higher criticism that it
had to do with the ancient, respectable, and lamented bar-of-judgment
theory.
Gabriel had played his trump; and those of us who could not follow suit
were arraigned for examination. I noticed at one side a gathering of
professional bondsmen in solemn black and collars that buttoned behind;
but it seemed there was some trouble about their real estate titles; and they
did not appear to be getting any of us out.
A fly cop—an angel policeman—flew over to me and took me by the left
wing. Near at hand was a group of very prosperous-looking spirits
arraigned for judgment.
“Do you belong with that bunch?” the policeman asked.
“Who are they?” was my answer.
“Why,” said he, “they are—”
But this irrelevant stuff is taking up space that the story should occupy.

Dulcie worked in a department store. She sold Hamburg edging, or
stuffed peppers, or automobiles, or other little trinkets such as they keep in
department stores. Of what she earned, Dulcie received six dollars per
week. The remainder was credited to her and debited to somebody else’s
account in the ledger kept by G–––– Oh, primal energy, you say, Reverend
Doctor—Well then, in the Ledger of Primal Energy.
During her first year in the store, Dulcie was paid five dollars per week.
It would be instructive to know how she lived on that amount. Don’t care?
Very well; probably you are interested in larger amounts. Six dollars is a
larger amount. I will tell you how she lived on six dollars per week.
One afternoon at six, when Dulcie was sticking her hat-pin within an
eighth of an inch of her medulla oblongata, she said to her chum, Sadie—
the girl that waits on you with her left side:
“Say, Sade, I made a date for dinner this evening with Piggy.”
“You never did!” exclaimed Sadie admiringly. “Well, ain’t you the lucky
one? Piggy’s an awful swell; and he always takes a girl to swell places. He
took Blanche up to the Hoffman House one evening, where they have swell
music, and you see a lot of swells. You’ll have a swell time, Dulce.”
Dulcie hurried homeward. Her eyes were shining, and her cheeks showed
the delicate pink of life’s—real life’s—approaching dawn. It was Friday;
and she had fifty cents left of her last week’s wages.
The streets were filled with the rush-hour floods of people. The electric
lights of Broadway were glowing—calling moths from miles, from leagues,
from hundreds of leagues out of darkness around to come in and attend the
singeing school. Men in accurate clothes, with faces like those carved on
cherry stones by the old salts in sailors’ homes, turned and stared at Dulcie
as she sped, unheeding, past them. Manhattan, the night-blooming cereus,
was beginning to unfold its dead-white, heavy-odoured petals.
Dulcie stopped in a store where goods were cheap and bought an
imitation lace collar with her fifty cents. That money was to have been
spent otherwise—fifteen cents for supper, ten cents for breakfast, ten cents
for lunch. Another dime was to be added to her small store of savings; and
five cents was to be squandered for licorice drops—the kind that made your
cheek look like the toothache, and last as long. The licorice was an
extravagance—almost a carouse—but what is life without pleasures?

Dulcie lived in a furnished room. There is this difference between a
furnished room and a boarding-house. In a furnished room, other people do
not know it when you go hungry.
Dulcie went up to her room—the third floor back in a West Side
brownstone-front. She lit the gas. Scientists tell us that the diamond is the
hardest substance known. Their mistake. Landladies know of a compound
beside which the diamond is as putty. They pack it in the tips of gas-
burners; and one may stand on a chair and dig at it in vain until one’s
fingers are pink and bruised. A hairpin will not remove it; therefore let us
call it immovable.
So Dulcie lit the gas. In its one-fourth-candlepower glow we will observe
the room.
Couch-bed, dresser, table, washstand, chair—of this much the landlady
was guilty. The rest was Dulcie’s. On the dresser were her treasures—a gilt
china vase presented to her by Sadie, a calendar issued by a pickle works, a
book on the divination of dreams, some rice powder in a glass dish, and a
cluster of artificial cherries tied with a pink ribbon.
Against the wrinkly mirror stood pictures of General Kitchener, William
Muldoon, the Duchess of Marlborough, and Benvenuto Cellini. Against one
wall was a plaster of Paris plaque of an O’Callahan in a Roman helmet.
Near it was a violent oleograph of a lemon-coloured child assaulting an
inflammatory butterfly. This was Dulcie’s final judgment in art; but it had
never been upset. Her rest had never been disturbed by whispers of stolen
copes; no critic had elevated his eyebrows at her infantile entomologist.
Piggy was to call for her at seven. While she swiftly makes ready, let us
discreetly face the other way and gossip.
For the room, Dulcie paid two dollars per week. On week-days her
breakfast cost ten cents; she made coffee and cooked an egg over the
gaslight while she was dressing. On Sunday mornings she feasted royally
on veal chops and pineapple fritters at “Billy’s” restaurant, at a cost of
twenty-five cents—and tipped the waitress ten cents. New York presents so
many temptations for one to run into extravagance. She had her lunches in
the department-store restaurant at a cost of sixty cents for the week; dinners
were $1.05. The evening papers—show me a New Yorker going without his
daily paper!—came to six cents; and two Sunday papers—one for the

personal column and the other to read—were ten cents. The total amounts
to $4.76. Now, one has to buy clothes, and—
I give it up. I hear of wonderful bargains in fabrics, and of miracles
performed with needle and thread; but I am in doubt. I hold my pen poised
in vain when I would add to Dulcie’s life some of those joys that belong to
woman by virtue of all the unwritten, sacred, natural, inactive ordinances of
the equity of heaven. Twice she had been to Coney Island and had ridden
the hobby-horses. ’Tis a weary thing to count your pleasures by summers
instead of by hours.
Piggy needs but a word. When the girls named him, an undeserving
stigma was cast upon the noble family of swine. The words-of-three-letters
lesson in the old blue spelling book begins with Piggy’s biography. He was
fat; he had the soul of a rat, the habits of a bat, and the magnanimity of a cat
. . . He wore expensive clothes; and was a connoisseur in starvation. He
could look at a shop-girl and tell you to an hour how long it had been since
she had eaten anything more nourishing than marshmallows and tea. He
hung about the shopping districts, and prowled around in department stores
with his invitations to dinner. Men who escort dogs upon the streets at the
end of a string look down upon him. He is a type; I can dwell upon him no
longer; my pen is not the kind intended for him; I am no carpenter.
At ten minutes to seven Dulcie was ready. She looked at herself in the
wrinkly mirror. The reflection was satisfactory. The dark blue dress, fitting
without a wrinkle, the hat with its jaunty black feather, the but-slightly-
soiled gloves—all representing self-denial, even of food itself—were vastly
becoming.
Dulcie forgot everything else for a moment except that she was beautiful,
and that life was about to lift a corner of its mysterious veil for her to
observe its wonders. No gentleman had ever asked her out before. Now she
was going for a brief moment into the glitter and exalted show.
The girls said that Piggy was a “spender.” There would be a grand dinner,
and music, and splendidly dressed ladies to look at, and things to eat that
strangely twisted the girls’ jaws when they tried to tell about them. No
doubt she would be asked out again. There was a blue pongee suit in a
window that she knew—by saving twenty cents a week instead of ten, in—
let’s see—Oh, it would run into years! But there was a second-hand store in
Seventh Avenue where—

Somebody knocked at the door. Dulcie opened it. The landlady stood
there with a spurious smile, sniffing for cooking by stolen gas.
“A gentleman’s downstairs to see you,” she said. “Name is Mr. Wiggins.”
By such epithet was Piggy known to unfortunate ones who had to take
him seriously.
Dulcie turned to the dresser to get her handkerchief; and then she stopped
still, and bit her underlip hard. While looking in her mirror she had seen
fairyland and herself, a princess, just awakening from a long slumber. She
had forgotten one that was watching her with sad, beautiful, stern eyes—the
only one there was to approve or condemn what she did. Straight and
slender and tall, with a look of sorrowful reproach on his handsome,
melancholy face, General Kitchener fixed his wonderful eyes on her out of
his gilt photograph frame on the dresser.
Dulcie turned like an automatic doll to the landlady.
“Tell him I can’t go,” she said dully. “Tell him I’m sick, or something.
Tell him I’m not going out.”
After the door was closed and locked, Dulcie fell upon her bed, crushing
her black tip, and cried for ten minutes. General Kitchener was her only
friend. He was Dulcie’s ideal of a gallant knight. He looked as if he might
have a secret sorrow, and his wonderful moustache was a dream, and she
was a little afraid of that stern yet tender look in his eyes. She used to have
little fancies that he would call at the house sometime, and ask for her, with
his sword clanking against his high boots. Once, when a boy was rattling a
piece of chain against a lamp-post she had opened the window and looked
out. But there was no use. She knew that General Kitchener was away over
in Japan, leading his army against the savage Turks; and he would never
step out of his gilt frame for her. Yet one look from him had vanquished
Piggy that night. Yes, for that night.
When her cry was over Dulcie got up and took off her best dress, and put
on her old blue kimono. She wanted no dinner. She sang two verses of
“Sammy.” Then she became intensely interested in a little red speck on the
side of her nose. And after that was attended to, she drew up a chair to the
rickety table, and told her fortune with an old deck of cards.
“The horrid, impudent thing!” she said aloud. “And I never gave him a
word or a look to make him think it!”

At nine o’clock Dulcie took a tin box of crackers and a little pot of
raspberry jam out of her trunk, and had a feast. She offered General
Kitchener some jam on a cracker; but he only looked at her as the sphinx
would have looked at a butterfly—if there are butterflies in the desert.
“Don’t eat it if you don’t want to,” said Dulcie. “And don’t put on so
many airs and scold so with your eyes. I wonder if you’d be so superior and
snippy if you had to live on six dollars a week.”
It was not a good sign for Dulcie to be rude to General Kitchener. And
then she turned Benvenuto Cellini face downward with a severe gesture.
But that was not inexcusable; for she had always thought he was Henry
VIII, and she did not approve of him.
At half-past nine Dulcie took a last look at the pictures on the dresser,
turned out the light, and skipped into bed. It’s an awful thing to go to bed
with a good-night look at General Kitchener, William Muldoon, the
Duchess of Marlborough, and Benvenuto Cellini. This story really doesn’t
get anywhere at all. The rest of it comes later—sometime when Piggy asks
Dulcie again to dine with him, and she is feeling lonelier than usual, and
General Kitchener happens to be looking the other way; and then—
As I said before, I dreamed that I was standing near a crowd of
prosperous-looking angels, and a policeman took me by the wing and asked
if I belonged with them.
“Who are they?” I asked.
“Why,” said he, “they are the men who hired working-girls, and paid ’em
five or six dollars a week to live on. Are you one of the bunch?”
“Not on your immortality,” said I. “I’m only the fellow that set fire to an
orphan asylum, and murdered a blind man for his pennies.”

THE CALIPH, CUPID AND THE CLOCK

Prince Michael, of the Electorate of Valleluna, sat on his favourite bench
in the park. The coolness of the September night quickened the life in him
like a rare, tonic wine. The benches were not filled; for park loungers, with
their stagnant blood, are prompt to detect and fly home from the crispness
of early autumn. The moon was just clearing the roofs of the range of
dwellings that bounded the quadrangle on the east. Children laughed and
played about the fine-sprayed fountain. In the shadowed spots fauns and
hamadryads wooed, unconscious of the gaze of mortal eyes. A hand organ
—Philomel by the grace of our stage carpenter, Fancy—fluted and droned
in a side street. Around the enchanted boundaries of the little park street
cars spat and mewed and the stilted trains roared like tigers and lions
prowling for a place to enter. And above the trees shone the great, round,
shining face of an illuminated clock in the tower of an antique public
building.
Prince Michael’s shoes were wrecked far beyond the skill of the
carefullest cobbler. The ragman would have declined any negotiations
concerning his clothes. The two weeks’ stubble on his face was grey and
brown and red and greenish yellow—as if it had been made up from
individual contributions from the chorus of a musical comedy. No man
existed who had money enough to wear so bad a hat as his.
Prince Michael sat on his favourite bench and smiled. It was a diverting
thought to him that he was wealthy enough to buy every one of those close-
ranged, bulky, window-lit mansions that faced him, if he chose. He could
have matched gold, equipages, jewels, art treasures, estates and acres with
any Croesus in this proud city of Manhattan, and scarcely have entered
upon the bulk of his holdings. He could have sat at table with reigning
sovereigns. The social world, the world of art, the fellowship of the elect,
adulation, imitation, the homage of the fairest, honours from the highest,
praise from the wisest, flattery, esteem, credit, pleasure, fame—all the

honey of life was waiting in the comb in the hive of the world for Prince
Michael, of the Electorate of Valleluna, whenever he might choose to take
it. But his choice was to sit in rags and dinginess on a bench in a park. For
he had tasted of the fruit of the tree of life, and, finding it bitter in his
mouth, had stepped out of Eden for a time to seek distraction close to the
unarmoured, beating heart of the world.
These thoughts strayed dreamily through the mind of Prince Michael, as
he smiled under the stubble of his polychromatic beard. Lounging thus, clad
as the poorest of mendicants in the parks, he loved to study humanity. He
found in altruism more pleasure than his riches, his station and all the
grosser sweets of life had given him. It was his chief solace and satisfaction
to alleviate individual distress, to confer favours upon worthy ones who had
need of succour, to dazzle unfortunates by unexpected and bewildering gifts
of truly royal magnificence, bestowed, however, with wisdom and
judiciousness.
And as Prince Michael’s eye rested upon the glowing face of the great
clock in the tower, his smile, altruistic as it was, became slightly tinged with
contempt. Big thoughts were the Prince’s; and it was always with a shake of
his head that he considered the subjugation of the world to the arbitrary
measures of Time. The comings and goings of people in hurry and dread,
controlled by the little metal moving hands of a clock, always made him
sad.
By and by came a young man in evening clothes and sat upon the third
bench from the Prince. For half an hour he smoked cigars with nervous
haste, and then he fell to watching the face of the illuminated clock above
the trees. His perturbation was evident, and the Prince noted, in sorrow, that
its cause was connected, in some manner, with the slowly moving hands of
the timepiece.
His Highness arose and went to the young man’s bench.
“I beg your pardon for addressing you,” he said, “but I perceive that you
are disturbed in mind. If it may serve to mitigate the liberty I have taken I
will add that I am Prince Michael, heir to the throne of the Electorate of
Valleluna. I appear incognito, of course, as you may gather from my
appearance. It is a fancy of mine to render aid to others whom I think
worthy of it. Perhaps the matter that seems to distress you is one that would
more readily yield to our mutual efforts.”

The young man looked up brightly at the Prince. Brightly, but the
perpendicular line of perplexity between his brows was not smoothed away.
He laughed, and even then it did not. But he accepted the momentary
diversion.
“Glad to meet you, Prince,” he said, good humouredly. “Yes, I’d say you
were incog. all right. Thanks for your offer of assistance—but I don’t see
where your butting-in would help things any. It’s a kind of private affair,
you know—but thanks all the same.”
Prince Michael sat at the young man’s side. He was often rebuffed but
never offensively. His courteous manner and words forbade that.
“Clocks,” said the Prince, “are shackles on the feet of mankind. I have
observed you looking persistently at that clock. Its face is that of a tyrant,
its numbers are false as those on a lottery ticket; its hands are those of a
bunco steerer, who makes an appointment with you to your ruin. Let me
entreat you to throw off its humiliating bonds and to cease to order your
affairs by that insensate monitor of brass and steel.”
“I don’t usually,” said the young man. “I carry a watch except when I’ve
got my radiant rags on.”
“I know human nature as I do the trees and grass,” said the Prince, with
earnest dignity. “I am a master of philosophy, a graduate in art, and I hold
the purse of a Fortunatus. There are few mortal misfortunes that I cannot
alleviate or overcome. I have read your countenance, and found in it
honesty and nobility as well as distress. I beg of you to accept my advice or
aid. Do not belie the intelligence I see in your face by judging from my
appearance of my ability to defeat your troubles.”
The young man glanced at the clock again and frowned darkly. When his
gaze strayed from the glowing horologue of time it rested intently upon a
four-story red brick house in the row of dwellings opposite to where he sat.
The shades were drawn, and the lights in many rooms shone dimly through
them.
“Ten minutes to nine!” exclaimed the young man, with an impatient
gesture of despair. He turned his back upon the house and took a rapid step
or two in a contrary direction.
“Remain!” commanded Prince Michael, in so potent a voice that the
disturbed one wheeled around with a somewhat chagrined laugh.

“I’ll give her the ten minutes and then I’m off,” he muttered, and then
aloud to the Prince: “I’ll join you in confounding all clocks, my friend, and
throw in women, too.”
“Sit down,” said the Prince calmly. “I do not accept your addition.
Women are the natural enemies of clocks, and, therefore, the allies of those
who would seek liberation from these monsters that measure our follies and
limit our pleasures. If you will so far confide in me I would ask you to
relate to me your story.”
The young man threw himself upon the bench with a reckless laugh.
“Your Royal Highness, I will,” he said, in tones of mock deference. “Do
you see yonder house—the one with three upper windows lighted? Well, at
6 o’clock I stood in that house with the young lady I am—that is, I was—
engaged to. I had been doing wrong, my dear Prince—I had been a naughty
boy, and she had heard of it. I wanted to be forgiven, of course—we are
always wanting women to forgive us, aren’t we, Prince?”
“‘I want time to think it over,’ said she. ‘There is one thing certain; I will
either fully forgive you, or I will never see your face again. There will be no
half-way business. At half-past eight,’ she said, ‘at exactly half-past eight
you may be watching the middle upper window of the top floor. If I decide
to forgive I will hang out of that window a white silk scarf. You will know
by that that all is as was before, and you may come to me. If you see no
scarf you may consider that everything between us is ended forever.’ That,”
concluded the young man bitterly, “is why I have been watching that clock.
The time for the signal to appear has passed twenty-three minutes ago. Do
you wonder that I am a little disturbed, my Prince of Rags and Whiskers?”
“Let me repeat to you,” said Prince Michael, in his even, well-modulated
tones, “that women are the natural enemies of clocks. Clocks are an evil,
women a blessing. The signal may yet appear.”
“Never, on your principality!” exclaimed the young man, hopelessly.
“You don’t know Marian—of course. She’s always on time, to the minute.
That was the first thing about her that attracted me. I’ve got the mitten
instead of the scarf. I ought to have known at 8.31 that my goose was
cooked. I’ll go West on the 11.45 to-night with Jack Milburn. The jig’s up.
I’ll try Jack’s ranch awhile and top off with the Klondike and whiskey.
Good-night—er—er—Prince.”

Prince Michael smiled his enigmatic, gentle, comprehending smile and
caught the coat sleeve of the other. The brilliant light in the Prince’s eyes
was softening to a dreamier, cloudy translucence.
“Wait,” he said solemnly, “till the clock strikes. I have wealth and power
and knowledge above most men, but when the clock strikes I am afraid.
Stay by me until then. This woman shall be yours. You have the word of the
hereditary Prince of Valleluna. On the day of your marriage I will give you
$100,000 and a palace on the Hudson. But there must be no clocks in that
palace—they measure our follies and limit our pleasures. Do you agree to
that?”
“Of course,” said the young man, cheerfully, “they’re a nuisance, anyway
—always ticking and striking and getting you late for dinner.”
He glanced again at the clock in the tower. The hands stood at three
minutes to nine.
“I think,” said Prince Michael, “that I will sleep a little. The day has been
fatiguing.”
He stretched himself upon a bench with the manner of one who had slept
thus before.
“You will find me in this park on any evening when the weather is
suitable,” said the Prince, sleepily. “Come to me when your marriage day is
set and I will give you a cheque for the money.”
“Thanks, Your Highness,” said the young man, seriously. “It doesn’t look
as if I would need that palace on the Hudson, but I appreciate your offer,
just the same.”
Prince Michael sank into deep slumber. His battered hat rolled from the
bench to the ground. The young man lifted it, placed it over the frowsy face
and moved one of the grotesquely relaxed limbs into a more comfortable
position. “Poor devil!” he said, as he drew the tattered clothes closer about
the Prince’s breast.
Sonorous and startling came the stroke of 9 from the clock tower. The
young man sighed again, turned his face for one last look at the house of his
relinquished hopes—and cried aloud profane words of holy rapture.
From the middle upper window blossomed in the dusk a waving, snowy,
fluttering, wonderful, divine emblem of forgiveness and promised joy.

By came a citizen, rotund, comfortable, home-hurrying, unknowing of
the delights of waving silken scarfs on the borders of dimly-lit parks.
“Will you oblige me with the time, sir?” asked the young man; and the
citizen, shrewdly conjecturing his watch to be safe, dragged it out and
announced:
“Twenty-nine and a half minutes past eight, sir.”
And then, from habit, he glanced at the clock in the tower, and made
further oration.
“By George! that clock’s half an hour fast! First time in ten years I’ve
known it to be off. This watch of mine never varies a—”
But the citizen was talking to vacancy. He turned and saw his hearer, a
fast receding black shadow, flying in the direction of a house with three
lighted upper windows.
And in the morning came along two policemen on their way to the beats
they owned. The park was deserted save for one dilapidated figure that
sprawled, asleep, on a bench. They stopped and gazed upon it.
“It’s Dopy Mike,” said one. “He hits the pipe every night. Park bum for
twenty years. On his last legs, I guess.”
The other policeman stooped and looked at something crumpled and
crisp in the hand of the sleeper.
“Gee!” he remarked. “He’s doped out a fifty-dollar bill, anyway. Wish I
knew the brand of hop that he smokes.”
And then “Rap, rap, rap!” went the club of realism against the shoe soles
of Prince Michael, of the Electorate of Valleluna.

SISTERS OF THE GOLDEN CIRCLE

The Rubberneck Auto was about ready to start. The merry top-riders had
been assigned to their seats by the gentlemanly conductor. The sidewalk
was blockaded with sightseers who had gathered to stare at sightseers,
justifying the natural law that every creature on earth is preyed upon by
some other creature.
The megaphone man raised his instrument of torture; the inside of the
great automobile began to thump and throb like the heart of a coffee
drinker. The top-riders nervously clung to the seats; the old lady from
Valparaiso, Indiana, shrieked to be put ashore. But, before a wheel turns,
listen to a brief preamble through the cardiaphone, which shall point out to
you an object of interest on life’s sightseeing tour.
Swift and comprehensive is the recognition of white man for white man
in African wilds; instant and sure is the spiritual greeting between mother
and babe; unhesitatingly do master and dog commune across the slight gulf
between animal and man; immeasurably quick and sapient are the brief
messages between one and one’s beloved. But all these instances set forth
only slow and groping interchange of sympathy and thought beside one
other instance which the Rubberneck coach shall disclose. You shall learn
(if you have not learned already) what two beings of all earth’s living
inhabitants most quickly look into each other’s hearts and souls when they
meet face to face.
The gong whirred, and the Glaring-at-Gotham car moved majestically
upon its instructive tour.
On the highest, rear seat was James Williams, of Cloverdale, Missouri,
and his Bride.
Capitalise it, friend typo—that last word—word of words in the epiphany
of life and love. The scent of the flowers, the booty of the bee, the primal
drip of spring waters, the overture of the lark, the twist of lemon peel on the

cocktail of creation—such is the bride. Holy is the wife; revered the mother;
galliptious is the summer girl—but the bride is the certified check among
the wedding presents that the gods send in when man is married to
mortality.
The car glided up the Golden Way. On the bridge of the great cruiser the
captain stood, trumpeting the sights of the big city to his passengers. Wide-
mouthed and open-eared, they heard the sights of the metropolis thundered
forth to their eyes. Confused, delirious with excitement and provincial
longings, they tried to make ocular responses to the megaphonic ritual. In
the solemn spires of spreading cathedrals they saw the home of the
Vanderbilts; in the busy bulk of the Grand Central depot they viewed,
wonderingly, the frugal cot of Russell Sage. Bidden to observe the
highlands of the Hudson, they gaped, unsuspecting, at the upturned
mountains of a new-laid sewer. To many the elevated railroad was the
Rialto, on the stations of which uniformed men sat and made chop suey of
your tickets. And to this day in the outlying districts many have it that
Chuck Connors, with his hand on his heart, leads reform; and that but for
the noble municipal efforts of one Parkhurst, a district attorney, the
notorious “Bishop” Potter gang would have destroyed law and order from
the Bowery to the Harlem River.
But I beg you to observe Mrs. James Williams—Hattie Chalmers that
was—once the belle of Cloverdale. Pale-blue is the bride’s, if she will; and
this colour she had honoured. Willingly had the moss rosebud loaned to her
cheeks of its pink—and as for the violet!—her eyes will do very well as
they are, thank you. A useless strip of white chaf—oh, no, he was guiding
the auto car—of white chiffon—or perhaps it was grenadine or tulle—was
tied beneath her chin, pretending to hold her bonnet in place. But you know
as well as I do that the hatpins did the work.
And on Mrs. James Williams’s face was recorded a little library of the
world’s best thoughts in three volumes. Volume No. 1 contained the belief
that James Williams was about the right sort of thing. Volume No. 2 was an
essay on the world, declaring it to be a very excellent place. Volume No. 3
disclosed the belief that in occupying the highest seat in a Rubberneck auto
they were travelling the pace that passes all understanding.
James Williams, you would have guessed, was about twenty-four. It will
gratify you to know that your estimate was so accurate. He was exactly

twenty-three years, eleven months and twenty-nine days old. He was well
built, active, strong-jawed, good-natured and rising. He was on his wedding
trip.
Dear kind fairy, please cut out those orders for money and 40 H. P.
touring cars and fame and a new growth of hair and the presidency of the
boat club. Instead of any of them turn backward—oh, turn backward and
give us just a teeny-weeny bit of our wedding trip over again. Just an hour,
dear fairy, so we can remember how the grass and poplar trees looked, and
the bow of those bonnet strings tied beneath her chin—even if it was the
hatpins that did the work. Can’t do it? Very well; hurry up with that touring
car and the oil stock, then.
Just in front of Mrs. James Williams sat a girl in a loose tan jacket and a
straw hat adorned with grapes and roses. Only in dreams and milliners’
shops do we, alas! gather grapes and roses at one swipe. This girl gazed
with large blue eyes, credulous, when the megaphone man roared his
doctrine that millionaires were things about which we should be concerned.
Between blasts she resorted to Epictetian philosophy in the form of pepsin
chewing gum.
At this girl’s right hand sat a young man about twenty-four. He was well-
built, active, strong-jawed and good-natured. But if his description seems to
follow that of James Williams, divest it of anything Cloverdalian. This man
belonged to hard streets and sharp corners. He looked keenly about him,
seeming to begrudge the asphalt under the feet of those upon whom he
looked down from his perch.
While the megaphone barks at a famous hostelry, let me whisper you
through the low-tuned cardiaphone to sit tight; for now things are about to
happen, and the great city will close over them again as over a scrap of
ticker tape floating down from the den of a Broad street bear.
The girl in the tan jacket twisted around to view the pilgrims on the last
seat. The other passengers she had absorbed; the seat behind her was her
Bluebeard’s chamber.
Her eyes met those of Mrs. James Williams. Between two ticks of a
watch they exchanged their life’s experiences, histories, hopes and fancies.
And all, mind you, with the eye, before two men could have decided
whether to draw steel or borrow a match.

The bride leaned forward low. She and the girl spoke rapidly together,
their tongues moving quickly like those of two serpents—a comparison that
is not meant to go further. Two smiles and a dozen nods closed the
conference.
And now in the broad, quiet avenue in front of the Rubberneck car a man
in dark clothes stood with uplifted hand. From the sidewalk another hurried
to join him.
The girl in the fruitful hat quickly seized her companion by the arm and
whispered in his ear. That young man exhibited proof of ability to act
promptly. Crouching low, he slid over the edge of the car, hung lightly for
an instant, and then disappeared. Half a dozen of the top-riders observed his
feat, wonderingly, but made no comment, deeming it prudent not to express
surprise at what might be the conventional manner of alighting in this
bewildering city. The truant passenger dodged a hansom and then floated
past, like a leaf on a stream between a furniture van and a florist’s delivery
wagon.
The girl in the tan jacket turned again, and looked in the eyes of Mrs.
James Williams. Then she faced about and sat still while the Rubberneck
auto stopped at the flash of the badge under the coat of the plainclothes
man.
“What’s eatin’ you?” demanded the megaphonist, abandoning his
professional discourse for pure English.
“Keep her at anchor for a minute,” ordered the officer. “There’s a man on
board we want—a Philadelphia burglar called ‘Pinky’ McGuire. There he is
on the back seat. Look out for the side, Donovan.”
Donovan went to the hind wheel and looked up at James Williams.
“Come down, old sport,” he said, pleasantly. “We’ve got you. Back to
Sleepytown for yours. It ain’t a bad idea, hidin’ on a Rubberneck, though.
I’ll remember that.”
Softly through the megaphone came the advice of the conductor:
“Better step off, sir, and explain. The car must proceed on its tour.”
James Williams belonged among the level heads. With necessary
slowness he picked his way through the passengers down to the steps at the
front of the car. His wife followed, but she first turned her eyes and saw the

escaped tourist glide from behind the furniture van and slip behind a tree on
the edge of the little park, not fifty feet away.
Descended to the ground, James Williams faced his captors with a smile.
He was thinking what a good story he would have to tell in Cloverdale
about having been mistaken for a burglar. The Rubberneck coach lingered,
out of respect for its patrons. What could be a more interesting sight than
this?
“My name is James Williams, of Cloverdale, Missouri,” he said kindly,
so that they would not be too greatly mortified. “I have letters here that will
show—”
“You’ll come with us, please,” announced the plainclothes man. “‘Pinky’
McGuire’s description fits you like flannel washed in hot suds. A detective
saw you on the Rubberneck up at Central Park and ’phoned down to take
you in. Do your explaining at the station-house.”
James Williams’s wife—his bride of two weeks—looked him in the face
with a strange, soft radiance in her eyes and a flush on her cheeks, looked
him in the face and said:
“Go with ’em quietly, ‘Pinky,’ and maybe it’ll be in your favour.”
And then as the Glaring-at-Gotham car rolled away she turned and threw
a kiss—his wife threw a kiss—at some one high up on the seats of the
Rubberneck.
“Your girl gives you good advice, McGuire,” said Donovan. “Come on,
now.”
And then madness descended upon and occupied James Williams. He
pushed his hat far upon the back of his head.
“My wife seems to think I am a burglar,” he said, recklessly. “I never
heard of her being crazy; therefore I must be. And if I’m crazy, they can’t
do anything to me for killing you two fools in my madness.”
Whereupon he resisted arrest so cheerfully and industriously that cops
had to be whistled for, and afterwards the reserves, to disperse a few
thousand delighted spectators.
At the station-house the desk sergeant asked for his name.
“McDoodle, the Pink, or Pinky the Brute, I forget which,” was James
Williams’s answer. “But you can bet I’m a burglar; don’t leave that out. And

you might add that it took five of ’em to pluck the Pink. I’d especially like
to have that in the records.”
In an hour came Mrs. James Williams, with Uncle Thomas, of Madison
Avenue, in a respect-compelling motor car and proofs of the hero’s
innocence—for all the world like the third act of a drama backed by an
automobile mfg. co.
After the police had sternly reprimanded James Williams for imitating a
copyrighted burglar and given him as honourable a discharge as the
department was capable of, Mrs. Williams rearrested him and swept him
into an angle of the station-house. James Williams regarded her with one
eye. He always said that Donovan closed the other while somebody was
holding his good right hand. Never before had he given her a word of
reproach or of reproof.
“If you can explain,” he began rather stiffly, “why you—”
“Dear,” she interrupted, “listen. It was an hour’s pain and trial to you. I
did it for her—I mean the girl who spoke to me on the coach. I was so
happy, Jim—so happy with you that I didn’t dare to refuse that happiness to
another. Jim, they were married only this morning—those two; and I
wanted him to get away. While they were struggling with you I saw him
slip from behind his tree and hurry across the park. That’s all of it, dear—I
had to do it.”
Thus does one sister of the plain gold band know another who stands in
the enchanted light that shines but once and briefly for each one. By rice
and satin bows does mere man become aware of weddings. But bride
knoweth bride at the glance of an eye. And between them swiftly passes
comfort and meaning in a language that man and widows wot not of.

THE ROMANCE OF A BUSY BROKER

Pitcher, confidential clerk in the office of Harvey Maxwell, broker,
allowed a look of mild interest and surprise to visit his usually
expressionless countenance when his employer briskly entered at half past
nine in company with his young lady stenographer. With a snappy “Good-
morning, Pitcher,” Maxwell dashed at his desk as though he were intending
to leap over it, and then plunged into the great heap of letters and telegrams
waiting there for him.
The young lady had been Maxwell’s stenographer for a year. She was
beautiful in a way that was decidedly unstenographic. She forewent the
pomp of the alluring pompadour. She wore no chains, bracelets or lockets.
She had not the air of being about to accept an invitation to luncheon. Her
dress was grey and plain, but it fitted her figure with fidelity and discretion.
In her neat black turban hat was the gold-green wing of a macaw. On this
morning she was softly and shyly radiant. Her eyes were dreamily bright,
her cheeks genuine peachblow, her expression a happy one, tinged with
reminiscence.
Pitcher, still mildly curious, noticed a difference in her ways this
morning. Instead of going straight into the adjoining room, where her desk
was, she lingered, slightly irresolute, in the outer office. Once she moved
over by Maxwell’s desk, near enough for him to be aware of her presence.
The machine sitting at that desk was no longer a man; it was a busy New
York broker, moved by buzzing wheels and uncoiling springs.
“Well—what is it? Anything?” asked Maxwell sharply. His opened mail
lay like a bank of stage snow on his crowded desk. His keen grey eye,
impersonal and brusque, flashed upon her half impatiently.
“Nothing,” answered the stenographer, moving away with a little smile.
“Mr. Pitcher,” she said to the confidential clerk, “did Mr. Maxwell say
anything yesterday about engaging another stenographer?”

“He did,” answered Pitcher. “He told me to get another one. I notified the
agency yesterday afternoon to send over a few samples this morning. It’s
9.45 o’clock, and not a single picture hat or piece of pineapple chewing
gum has showed up yet.”
“I will do the work as usual, then,” said the young lady, “until some one
comes to fill the place.” And she went to her desk at once and hung the
black turban hat with the gold-green macaw wing in its accustomed place.
He who has been denied the spectacle of a busy Manhattan broker during
a rush of business is handicapped for the profession of anthropology. The
poet sings of the “crowded hour of glorious life.” The broker’s hour is not
only crowded, but the minutes and seconds are hanging to all the straps and
packing both front and rear platforms.
And this day was Harvey Maxwell’s busy day. The ticker began to reel
out jerkily its fitful coils of tape, the desk telephone had a chronic attack of
buzzing. Men began to throng into the office and call at him over the
railing, jovially, sharply, viciously, excitedly. Messenger boys ran in and out
with messages and telegrams. The clerks in the office jumped about like
sailors during a storm. Even Pitcher’s face relaxed into something
resembling animation.
On the Exchange there were hurricanes and landslides and snowstorms
and glaciers and volcanoes, and those elemental disturbances were
reproduced in miniature in the broker’s offices. Maxwell shoved his chair
against the wall and transacted business after the manner of a toe dancer. He
jumped from ticker to ’phone, from desk to door with the trained agility of a
harlequin.
In the midst of this growing and important stress the broker became
suddenly aware of a high-rolled fringe of golden hair under a nodding
canopy of velvet and ostrich tips, an imitation sealskin sacque and a string
of beads as large as hickory nuts, ending near the floor with a silver heart.
There was a self-possessed young lady connected with these accessories;
and Pitcher was there to construe her.
“Lady from the Stenographer’s Agency to see about the position,” said
Pitcher.
Maxwell turned half around, with his hands full of papers and ticker tape.
“What position?” he asked, with a frown.

“Position of stenographer,” said Pitcher. “You told me yesterday to call
them up and have one sent over this morning.”
“You are losing your mind, Pitcher,” said Maxwell. “Why should I have
given you any such instructions? Miss Leslie has given perfect satisfaction
during the year she has been here. The place is hers as long as she chooses
to retain it. There’s no place open here, madam. Countermand that order
with the agency, Pitcher, and don’t bring any more of ’em in here.”
The silver heart left the office, swinging and banging itself independently
against the office furniture as it indignantly departed. Pitcher seized a
moment to remark to the bookkeeper that the “old man” seemed to get more
absent-minded and forgetful every day of the world.
The rush and pace of business grew fiercer and faster. On the floor they
were pounding half a dozen stocks in which Maxwell’s customers were
heavy investors. Orders to buy and sell were coming and going as swift as
the flight of swallows. Some of his own holdings were imperilled, and the
man was working like some high-geared, delicate, strong machine—strung
to full tension, going at full speed, accurate, never hesitating, with the
proper word and decision and act ready and prompt as clockwork. Stocks
and bonds, loans and mortgages, margins and securities—here was a world
of finance, and there was no room in it for the human world or the world of
nature.
When the luncheon hour drew near there came a slight lull in the uproar.
Maxwell stood by his desk with his hands full of telegrams and
memoranda, with a fountain pen over his right ear and his hair hanging in
disorderly strings over his forehead. His window was open, for the beloved
janitress Spring had turned on a little warmth through the waking registers
of the earth.
And through the window came a wandering—perhaps a lost—odour—a
delicate, sweet odour of lilac that fixed the broker for a moment
immovable. For this odour belonged to Miss Leslie; it was her own, and
hers only.
The odour brought her vividly, almost tangibly before him. The world of
finance dwindled suddenly to a speck. And she was in the next room—
twenty steps away.

“By George, I’ll do it now,” said Maxwell, half aloud. “I’ll ask her now. I
wonder I didn’t do it long ago.”
He dashed into the inner office with the haste of a short trying to cover.
He charged upon the desk of the stenographer.
She looked up at him with a smile. A soft pink crept over her cheek, and
her eyes were kind and frank. Maxwell leaned one elbow on her desk. He
still clutched fluttering papers with both hands and the pen was above his
ear.
“Miss Leslie,” he began hurriedly, “I have but a moment to spare. I want
to say something in that moment. Will you be my wife? I haven’t had time
to make love to you in the ordinary way, but I really do love you. Talk
quick, please—those fellows are clubbing the stuffing out of Union
Pacific.”
“Oh, what are you talking about?” exclaimed the young lady. She rose to
her feet and gazed upon him, round-eyed.
“Don’t you understand?” said Maxwell, restively. “I want you to marry
me. I love you, Miss Leslie. I wanted to tell you, and I snatched a minute
when things had slackened up a bit. They’re calling me for the ’phone now.
Tell ’em to wait a minute, Pitcher. Won’t you, Miss Leslie?”
The stenographer acted very queerly. At first she seemed overcome with
amazement; then tears flowed from her wondering eyes; and then she
smiled sunnily through them, and one of her arms slid tenderly about the
broker’s neck.
“I know now,” she said, softly. “It’s this old business that has driven
everything else out of your head for the time. I was frightened at first. Don’t
you remember, Harvey? We were married last evening at 8 o’clock in the
Little Church Around the Corner.”

AFTER TWENTY YEARS

The policeman on the beat moved up the avenue impressively. The
impressiveness was habitual and not for show, for spectators were few. The
time was barely 10 o’clock at night, but chilly gusts of wind with a taste of
rain in them had well nigh de-peopled the streets.
Trying doors as he went, twirling his club with many intricate and artful
movements, turning now and then to cast his watchful eye adown the
pacific thoroughfare, the officer, with his stalwart form and slight swagger,
made a fine picture of a guardian of the peace. The vicinity was one that
kept early hours. Now and then you might see the lights of a cigar store or
of an all-night lunch counter; but the majority of the doors belonged to
business places that had long since been closed.
When about midway of a certain block the policeman suddenly slowed
his walk. In the doorway of a darkened hardware store a man leaned, with
an unlighted cigar in his mouth. As the policeman walked up to him the
man spoke up quickly.
“It’s all right, officer,” he said, reassuringly. “I’m just waiting for a
friend. It’s an appointment made twenty years ago. Sounds a little funny to
you, doesn’t it? Well, I’ll explain if you’d like to make certain it’s all
straight. About that long ago there used to be a restaurant where this store
stands—‘Big Joe’ Brady’s restaurant.”
“Until five years ago,” said the policeman. “It was torn down then.”
The man in the doorway struck a match and lit his cigar. The light
showed a pale, square-jawed face with keen eyes, and a little white scar
near his right eyebrow. His scarfpin was a large diamond, oddly set.
“Twenty years ago to-night,” said the man, “I dined here at ‘Big Joe’
Brady’s with Jimmy Wells, my best chum, and the finest chap in the world.
He and I were raised here in New York, just like two brothers, together. I
was eighteen and Jimmy was twenty. The next morning I was to start for the

West to make my fortune. You couldn’t have dragged Jimmy out of New
York; he thought it was the only place on earth. Well, we agreed that night
that we would meet here again exactly twenty years from that date and
time, no matter what our conditions might be or from what distance we
might have to come. We figured that in twenty years each of us ought to
have our destiny worked out and our fortunes made, whatever they were
going to be.”
“It sounds pretty interesting,” said the policeman. “Rather a long time
between meets, though, it seems to me. Haven’t you heard from your friend
since you left?”
“Well, yes, for a time we corresponded,” said the other. “But after a year
or two we lost track of each other. You see, the West is a pretty big
proposition, and I kept hustling around over it pretty lively. But I know
Jimmy will meet me here if he’s alive, for he always was the truest,
stanchest old chap in the world. He’ll never forget. I came a thousand miles
to stand in this door to-night, and it’s worth it if my old partner turns up.”
The waiting man pulled out a handsome watch, the lids of it set with
small diamonds.
“Three minutes to ten,” he announced. “It was exactly ten o’clock when
we parted here at the restaurant door.”
“Did pretty well out West, didn’t you?” asked the policeman.
“You bet! I hope Jimmy has done half as well. He was a kind of plodder,
though, good fellow as he was. I’ve had to compete with some of the
sharpest wits going to get my pile. A man gets in a groove in New York. It
takes the West to put a razor-edge on him.”
The policeman twirled his club and took a step or two.
“I’ll be on my way. Hope your friend comes around all right. Going to
call time on him sharp?”
“I should say not!” said the other. “I’ll give him half an hour at least. If
Jimmy is alive on earth he’ll be here by that time. So long, officer.”
“Good-night, sir,” said the policeman, passing on along his beat, trying
doors as he went.
There was now a fine, cold drizzle falling, and the wind had risen from
its uncertain puffs into a steady blow. The few foot passengers astir in that
quarter hurried dismally and silently along with coat collars turned high and

pocketed hands. And in the door of the hardware store the man who had
come a thousand miles to fill an appointment, uncertain almost to absurdity,
with the friend of his youth, smoked his cigar and waited.
About twenty minutes he waited, and then a tall man in a long overcoat,
with collar turned up to his ears, hurried across from the opposite side of the
street. He went directly to the waiting man.
“Is that you, Bob?” he asked, doubtfully.
“Is that you, Jimmy Wells?” cried the man in the door.
“Bless my heart!” exclaimed the new arrival, grasping both the other’s
hands with his own. “It’s Bob, sure as fate. I was certain I’d find you here if
you were still in existence. Well, well, well!—twenty years is a long time.
The old restaurant’s gone, Bob; I wish it had lasted, so we could have had
another dinner there. How has the West treated you, old man?”
“Bully; it has given me everything I asked it for. You’ve changed lots,
Jimmy. I never thought you were so tall by two or three inches.”
“Oh, I grew a bit after I was twenty.”
“Doing well in New York, Jimmy?”
“Moderately. I have a position in one of the city departments. Come on,
Bob; we’ll go around to a place I know of, and have a good long talk about
old times.”
The two men started up the street, arm in arm. The man from the West,
his egotism enlarged by success, was beginning to outline the history of his
career. The other, submerged in his overcoat, listened with interest.
At the corner stood a drug store, brilliant with electric lights. When they
came into this glare each of them turned simultaneously to gaze upon the
other’s face.
The man from the West stopped suddenly and released his arm.
“You’re not Jimmy Wells,” he snapped. “Twenty years is a long time, but
not long enough to change a man’s nose from a Roman to a pug.”
“It sometimes changes a good man into a bad one,” said the tall man.
“You’ve been under arrest for ten minutes, ‘Silky’ Bob. Chicago thinks you
may have dropped over our way and wires us she wants to have a chat with
you. Going quietly, are you? That’s sensible. Now, before we go on to the

station here’s a note I was asked to hand you. You may read it here at the
window. It’s from Patrolman Wells.”
The man from the West unfolded the little piece of paper handed him. His
hand was steady when he began to read, but it trembled a little by the time
he had finished. The note was rather short.

Bob: I was at the appointed place on time. When you struck the
match to light your cigar I saw it was the face of the man wanted in
Chicago. Somehow I couldn’t do it myself, so I went around and got a
plain clothes man to do the job.
JIMMY.

LOST ON DRESS PARADE

Mr. Towers Chandler was pressing his evening suit in his hall bedroom.
One iron was heating on a small gas stove; the other was being pushed
vigorously back and forth to make the desirable crease that would be seen
later on extending in straight lines from Mr. Chandler’s patent leather shoes
to the edge of his low-cut vest. So much of the hero’s toilet may be
intrusted to our confidence. The remainder may be guessed by those whom
genteel poverty has driven to ignoble expedient. Our next view of him shall
be as he descends the steps of his lodging-house immaculately and correctly
clothed; calm, assured, handsome—in appearance the typical New York
young clubman setting out, slightly bored, to inaugurate the pleasures of the
evening.
Chandler’s honorarium was $18 per week. He was employed in the office
of an architect. He was twenty-two years old; he considered architecture to
be truly an art; and he honestly believed—though he would not have dared
to admit it in New York—that the Flatiron Building was inferior in design
to the great cathedral in Milan.
Out of each week’s earnings Chandler set aside $1. At the end of each ten
weeks with the extra capital thus accumulated, he purchased one
gentleman’s evening from the bargain counter of stingy old Father Time. He
arrayed himself in the regalia of millionaires and presidents; he took
himself to the quarter where life is brightest and showiest, and there dined
with taste and luxury. With ten dollars a man may, for a few hours, play the
wealthy idler to perfection. The sum is ample for a well-considered meal, a
bottle bearing a respectable label, commensurate tips, a smoke, cab fare and
the ordinary etceteras.
This one delectable evening culled from each dull seventy was to
Chandler a source of renascent bliss. To the society bud comes but one
début; it stands alone sweet in her memory when her hair has whitened; but
to Chandler each ten weeks brought a joy as keen, as thrilling, as new as the

first had been. To sit among bon vivants under palms in the swirl of
concealed music, to look upon the habitués of such a paradise and to be
looked upon by them—what is a girl’s first dance and short-sleeved tulle
compared with this?
Up Broadway Chandler moved with the vespertine dress parade. For this
evening he was an exhibit as well as a gazer. For the next sixty-nine
evenings he would be dining in cheviot and worsted at dubious table
d’hôtes, at whirlwind lunch counters, on sandwiches and beer in his hall-
bedroom. He was willing to do that, for he was a true son of the great city
of razzle-dazzle, and to him one evening in the limelight made up for many
dark ones.
Chandler protracted his walk until the Forties began to intersect the great
and glittering primrose way, for the evening was yet young, and when one
is of the beau monde only one day in seventy, one loves to protract the
pleasure. Eyes bright, sinister, curious, admiring, provocative, alluring were
bent upon him, for his garb and air proclaimed him a devotee to the hour of
solace and pleasure.
At a certain corner he came to a standstill, proposing to himself the
question of turning back toward the showy and fashionable restaurant in
which he usually dined on the evenings of his especial luxury. Just then a
girl scuddled lightly around the corner, slipped on a patch of icy snow and
fell plump upon the sidewalk.
Chandler assisted her to her feet with instant and solicitous courtesy. The
girl hobbled to the wall of the building, leaned against it, and thanked him
demurely.
“I think my ankle is strained,” she said. “It twisted when I fell.”
“Does it pain you much?” inquired Chandler.
“Only when I rest my weight upon it. I think I will be able to walk in a
minute or two.”
“If I can be of any further service,” suggested the young man, “I will call
a cab, or—”
“Thank you,” said the girl, softly but heartily. “I am sure you need not
trouble yourself any further. It was so awkward of me. And my shoe heels
are horridly common-sense; I can’t blame them at all.”

Chandler looked at the girl and found her swiftly drawing his interest.
She was pretty in a refined way; and her eye was both merry and kind. She
was inexpensively clothed in a plain black dress that suggested a sort of
uniform such as shop girls wear. Her glossy dark-brown hair showed its
coils beneath a cheap hat of black straw whose only ornament was a velvet
ribbon and bow. She could have posed as a model for the self-respecting
working girl of the best type.
A sudden idea came into the head of the young architect. He would ask
this girl to dine with him. Here was the element that his splendid but
solitary periodic feasts had lacked. His brief season of elegant luxury would
be doubly enjoyable if he could add to it a lady’s society. This girl was a
lady, he was sure—her manner and speech settled that. And in spite of her
extremely plain attire he felt that he would be pleased to sit at table with
her.
These thoughts passed swiftly through his mind, and he decided to ask
her. It was a breach of etiquette, of course, but oftentimes wage-earning
girls waived formalities in matters of this kind. They were generally shrewd
judges of men; and thought better of their own judgment than they did of
useless conventions. His ten dollars, discreetly expended, would enable the
two to dine very well indeed. The dinner would no doubt be a wonderful
experience thrown into the dull routine of the girl’s life; and her lively
appreciation of it would add to his own triumph and pleasure.
“I think,” he said to her, with frank gravity, “that your foot needs a longer
rest than you suppose. Now, I am going to suggest a way in which you can
give it that and at the same time do me a favour. I was on my way to dine
all by my lonely self when you came tumbling around the corner. You come
with me and we’ll have a cozy dinner and a pleasant talk together, and by
that time your game ankle will carry you home very nicely, I am sure.”
The girl looked quickly up into Chandler’s clear, pleasant countenance.
Her eyes twinkled once very brightly, and then she smiled ingenuously.
“But we don’t know each other—it wouldn’t be right, would it?” she
said, doubtfully.
“There is nothing wrong about it,” said the young man, candidly. “I’ll
introduce myself—permit me—Mr. Towers Chandler. After our dinner,
which I will try to make as pleasant as possible, I will bid you good-
evening, or attend you safely to your door, whichever you prefer.”

“But, dear me!” said the girl, with a glance at Chandler’s faultless attire.
“In this old dress and hat!”
“Never mind that,” said Chandler, cheerfully. “I’m sure you look more
charming in them than any one we shall see in the most elaborate dinner
toilette.”
“My ankle does hurt yet,” admitted the girl, attempting a limping step. “I
think I will accept your invitation, Mr. Chandler. You may call me—Miss
Marian.”
“Come then, Miss Marian,” said the young architect, gaily, but with
perfect courtesy; “you will not have far to walk. There is a very respectable
and good restaurant in the next block. You will have to lean on my arm—so
—and walk slowly. It is lonely dining all by one’s self. I’m just a little bit
glad that you slipped on the ice.”
When the two were established at a well-appointed table, with a
promising waiter hovering in attendance, Chandler began to experience the
real joy that his regular outing always brought to him.
The restaurant was not so showy or pretentious as the one further down
Broadway, which he always preferred, but it was nearly so. The tables were
well filled with prosperous-looking diners, there was a good orchestra,
playing softly enough to make conversation a possible pleasure, and the
cuisine and service were beyond criticism. His companion, even in her
cheap hat and dress, held herself with an air that added distinction to the
natural beauty of her face and figure. And it is certain that she looked at
Chandler, with his animated but self-possessed manner and his kindling and
frank blue eyes, with something not far from admiration in her own
charming face.
Then it was that the Madness of Manhattan, the frenzy of Fuss and
Feathers, the Bacillus of Brag, the Provincial Plague of Pose seized upon
Towers Chandler. He was on Broadway, surrounded by pomp and style, and
there were eyes to look at him. On the stage of that comedy he had assumed
to play the one-night part of a butterfly of fashion and an idler of means and
taste. He was dressed for the part, and all his good angels had not the power
to prevent him from acting it.
So he began to prate to Miss Marian of clubs, of teas, of golf and riding
and kennels and cotillions and tours abroad and threw out hints of a yacht
lying at Larchmont. He could see that she was vastly impressed by this

vague talk, so he endorsed his pose by random insinuations concerning
great wealth, and mentioned familiarly a few names that are handled
reverently by the proletariat. It was Chandler’s short little day, and he was
wringing from it the best that could be had, as he saw it. And yet once or
twice he saw the pure gold of this girl shine through the mist that his
egotism had raised between him and all objects.
“This way of living that you speak of,” she said, “sounds so futile and
purposeless. Haven’t you any work to do in the world that might interest
you more?”
“My dear Miss Marian,” he exclaimed—“work! Think of dressing every
day for dinner, of making half a dozen calls in an afternoon—with a
policeman at every corner ready to jump into your auto and take you to the
station, if you get up any greater speed than a donkey cart’s gait. We do-
nothings are the hardest workers in the land.”
The dinner was concluded, the waiter generously fed, and the two walked
out to the corner where they had met. Miss Marian walked very well now;
her limp was scarcely noticeable.
“Thank you for a nice time,” she said, frankly. “I must run home now. I
liked the dinner very much, Mr. Chandler.”
He shook hands with her, smiling cordially, and said something about a
game of bridge at his club. He watched her for a moment, walking rather
rapidly eastward, and then he found a cab to drive him slowly homeward.
In his chilly bedroom Chandler laid away his evening clothes for a sixty-
nine days’ rest. He went about it thoughtfully.
“That was a stunning girl,” he said to himself. “She’s all right, too, I’d be
sworn, even if she does have to work. Perhaps if I’d told her the truth
instead of all that razzle-dazzle we might—but, confound it! I had to play
up to my clothes.”
Thus spoke the brave who was born and reared in the wigwams of the
tribe of the Manhattans.
The girl, after leaving her entertainer, sped swiftly cross-town until she
arrived at a handsome and sedate mansion two squares to the east, facing on
that avenue which is the highway of Mammon and the auxiliary gods. Here
she entered hurriedly and ascended to a room where a handsome young
lady in an elaborate house dress was looking anxiously out the window.

“Oh, you madcap!” exclaimed the elder girl, when the other entered.
“When will you quit frightening us this way? It is two hours since you ran
out in that rag of an old dress and Marie’s hat. Mamma has been so
alarmed. She sent Louis in the auto to try to find you. You are a bad,
thoughtless Puss.”
The elder girl touched a button, and a maid came in a moment.
“Marie, tell mamma that Miss Marian has returned.”
“Don’t scold, sister. I only ran down to Mme. Theo’s to tell her to use
mauve insertion instead of pink. My costume and Marie’s hat were just
what I needed. Every one thought I was a shopgirl, I am sure.”
“Dinner is over, dear; you stayed so late.”
“I know. I slipped on the sidewalk and turned my ankle. I could not walk,
so I hobbled into a restaurant and sat there until I was better. That is why I
was so long.”
The two girls sat in the window seat, looking out at the lights and the
stream of hurrying vehicles in the avenue. The younger one cuddled down
with her head in her sister’s lap.
“We will have to marry some day,” she said dreamily—“both of us. We
have so much money that we will not be allowed to disappoint the public.
Do you want me to tell you the kind of a man I could love, Sis?”
“Go on, you scatterbrain,” smiled the other.
“I could love a man with dark and kind blue eyes, who is gentle and
respectful to poor girls, who is handsome and good and does not try to flirt.
But I could love him only if he had an ambition, an object, some work to do
in the world. I would not care how poor he was if I could help him build his
way up. But, sister dear, the kind of man we always meet—the man who
lives an idle life between society and his clubs—I could not love a man like
that, even if his eyes were blue and he were ever so kind to poor girls whom
he met in the street.”

BY COURIER

It was neither the season nor the hour when the Park had frequenters; and
it is likely that the young lady, who was seated on one of the benches at the
side of the walk, had merely obeyed a sudden impulse to sit for a while and
enjoy a foretaste of coming Spring.
She rested there, pensive and still. A certain melancholy that touched her
countenance must have been of recent birth, for it had not yet altered the
fine and youthful contours of her cheek, nor subdued the arch though
resolute curve of her lips.
A tall young man came striding through the park along the path near
which she sat. Behind him tagged a boy carrying a suit-case. At sight of the
young lady, the man’s face changed to red and back to pale again. He
watched her countenance as he drew nearer, with hope and anxiety mingled
on his own. He passed within a few yards of her, but he saw no evidence
that she was aware of his presence or existence.
Some fifty yards further on he suddenly stopped and sat on a bench at
one side. The boy dropped the suit-case and stared at him with wondering,
shrewd eyes. The young man took out his handkerchief and wiped his brow.
It was a good handkerchief, a good brow, and the young man was good to
look at. He said to the boy:
“I want you to take a message to that young lady on that bench. Tell her I
am on my way to the station, to leave for San Francisco, where I shall join
that Alaska moose-hunting expedition. Tell her that, since she has
commanded me neither to speak nor to write to her, I take this means of
making one last appeal to her sense of justice, for the sake of what has been.
Tell her that to condemn and discard one who has not deserved such
treatment, without giving him her reasons or a chance to explain is contrary
to her nature as I believe it to be. Tell her that I have thus, to a certain

degree, disobeyed her injunctions, in the hope that she may yet be inclined
to see justice done. Go, and tell her that.”
The young man dropped a half-dollar into the boy’s hand. The boy
looked at him for a moment with bright, canny eyes out of a dirty,
intelligent face, and then set off at a run. He approached the lady on the
bench a little doubtfully, but unembarrassed. He touched the brim of the old
plaid bicycle cap perched on the back of his head. The lady looked at him
coolly, without prejudice or favour.
“Lady,” he said, “dat gent on de oder bench sent yer a song and dance by
me. If yer don’t know de guy, and he’s tryin’ to do de Johnny act, say de
word, and I’ll call a cop in t’ree minutes. If yer does know him, and he’s on
de square, w’y I’ll spiel yer de bunch of hot air he sent yer.”
The young lady betrayed a faint interest.
“A song and dance!” she said, in a deliberate sweet voice that seemed to
clothe her words in a diaphanous garment of impalpable irony. “A new idea
—in the troubadour line, I suppose. I—used to know the gentleman who
sent you, so I think it will hardly be necessary to call the police. You may
execute your song and dance, but do not sing too loudly. It is a little early
yet for open-air vaudeville, and we might attract attention.”
“Awe,” said the boy, with a shrug down the length of him, “yer know
what I mean, lady. ’Tain’t a turn, it’s wind. He told me to tell yer he’s got
his collars and cuffs in dat grip for a scoot clean out to ’Frisco. Den he’s
goin’ to shoot snow-birds in de Klondike. He says yer told him not to send
’round no more pink notes nor come hangin’ over de garden gate, and he
takes dis means of puttin’ yer wise. He says yer refereed him out like a has-
been, and never give him no chance to kick at de decision. He says yer
swiped him, and never said why.”
The slightly awakened interest in the young lady’s eyes did not abate.
Perhaps it was caused by either the originality or the audacity of the snow-
bird hunter, in thus circumventing her express commands against the
ordinary modes of communication. She fixed her eye on a statue standing
disconsolate in the dishevelled park, and spoke into the transmitter:
“Tell the gentleman that I need not repeat to him a description of my
ideals. He knows what they have been and what they still are. So far as they
touch on this case, absolute loyalty and truth are the ones paramount. Tell
him that I have studied my own heart as well as one can, and I know its

weakness as well as I do its needs. That is why I decline to hear his pleas,
whatever they may be. I did not condemn him through hearsay or doubtful
evidence, and that is why I made no charge. But, since he persists in hearing
what he already well knows, you may convey the matter.
“Tell him that I entered the conservatory that evening from the rear, to
cut a rose for my mother. Tell him I saw him and Miss Ashburton beneath
the pink oleander. The tableau was pretty, but the pose and juxtaposition
were too eloquent and evident to require explanation. I left the
conservatory, and, at the same time, the rose and my ideal. You may carry
that song and dance to your impresario.”
“I’m shy on one word, lady. Jux—jux—put me wise on dat, will yer?”
“Juxtaposition—or you may call it propinquity—or, if you like, being
rather too near for one maintaining the position of an ideal.”
The gravel spun from beneath the boy’s feet. He stood by the other
bench. The man’s eyes interrogated him, hungrily. The boy’s were shining
with the impersonal zeal of the translator.
“De lady says dat she’s on to de fact dat gals is dead easy when a feller
comes spielin’ ghost stories and tryin’ to make up, and dat’s why she won’t
listen to no soft-soap. She says she caught yer dead to rights, huggin’ a
bunch o’ calico in de hot-house. She side-stepped in to pull some posies and
yer was squeezin’ de oder gal to beat de band. She says it looked cute, all
right all right, but it made her sick. She says yer better git busy, and make a
sneak for de train.”
The young man gave a low whistle and his eyes flashed with a sudden
thought. His hand flew to the inside pocket of his coat, and drew out a
handful of letters. Selecting one, he handed it to the boy, following it with a
silver dollar from his vest-pocket.
“Give that letter to the lady,” he said, “and ask her to read it. Tell her that
it should explain the situation. Tell her that, if she had mingled a little trust
with her conception of the ideal, much heartache might have been avoided.
Tell her that the loyalty she prizes so much has never wavered. Tell her I am
waiting for an answer.”
The messenger stood before the lady.
“De gent says he’s had de ski-bunk put on him widout no cause. He says
he’s no bum guy; and, lady, yer read dat letter, and I’ll bet yer he’s a white

sport, all right.”
The young lady unfolded the letter; somewhat doubtfully, and read it.

Dear Dr. Arnold: I want to thank you for your most kind and
opportune aid to my daughter last Friday evening, when she was
overcome by an attack of her old heart-trouble in the conservatory at
Mrs. Waldron’s reception. Had you not been near to catch her as she
fell and to render proper attention, we might have lost her. I would be
glad if you would call and undertake the treatment of her case.
Gratefully yours,
Robert Ashburton.

The young lady refolded the letter, and handed it to the boy.
“De gent wants an answer,” said the messenger. “Wot’s de word?”
The lady’s eyes suddenly flashed on him, bright, smiling and wet.
“Tell that guy on the other bench,” she said, with a happy, tremulous
laugh, “that his girl wants him.”

THE FURNISHED ROOM

Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itself is a certain vast bulk of the
population of the red brick district of the lower West Side. Homeless, they
have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to furnished room,
transients forever—transients in abode, transients in heart and mind. They
sing “Home, Sweet Home” in ragtime; they carry their lares et penates in a
bandbox; their vine is entwined about a picture hat; a rubber plant is their
fig tree.
Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand dwellers, should
have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but it would be
strange if there could not be found a ghost or two in the wake of all these
vagrant guests.
One evening after dark a young man prowled among these crumbling red
mansions, ringing their bells. At the twelfth he rested his lean hand-baggage
upon the step and wiped the dust from his hatband and forehead. The bell
sounded faint and far away in some remote, hollow depths.
To the door of this, the twelfth house whose bell he had rung, came a
housekeeper who made him think of an unwholesome, surfeited worm that
had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill the vacancy with
edible lodgers.
He asked if there was a room to let.
“Come in,” said the housekeeper. Her voice came from her throat; her
throat seemed lined with fur. “I have the third floor back, vacant since a
week back. Should you wish to look at it?”
The young man followed her up the stairs. A faint light from no particular
source mitigated the shadows of the halls. They trod noiselessly upon a stair
carpet that its own loom would have forsworn. It seemed to have become
vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or
spreading moss that grew in patches to the staircase and was viscid under

the foot like organic matter. At each turn of the stairs were vacant niches in
the wall. Perhaps plants had once been set within them. If so they had died
in that foul and tainted air. It may be that statues of the saints had stood
there, but it was not difficult to conceive that imps and devils had dragged
them forth in the darkness and down to the unholy depths of some furnished
pit below.
“This is the room,” said the housekeeper, from her furry throat. “It’s a
nice room. It ain’t often vacant. I had some most elegant people in it last
summer—no trouble at all, and paid in advance to the minute. The water’s
at the end of the hall. Sprowls and Mooney kept it three months. They done
a vaudeville sketch. Miss B’retta Sprowls—you may have heard of her—
Oh, that was just the stage names—right there over the dresser is where the
marriage certificate hung, framed. The gas is here, and you see there is
plenty of closet room. It’s a room everybody likes. It never stays idle long.”
“Do you have many theatrical people rooming here?” asked the young
man.
“They comes and goes. A good proportion of my lodgers is connected
with the theatres. Yes, sir, this is the theatrical district. Actor people never
stays long anywhere. I get my share. Yes, they comes and they goes.”
He engaged the room, paying for a week in advance. He was tired, he
said, and would take possession at once. He counted out the money. The
room had been made ready, she said, even to towels and water. As the
housekeeper moved away he put, for the thousandth time, the question that
he carried at the end of his tongue.
“A young girl—Miss Vashner—Miss Eloise Vashner—do you remember
such a one among your lodgers? She would be singing on the stage, most
likely. A fair girl, of medium height and slender, with reddish, gold hair and
a dark mole near her left eyebrow.”
“No, I don’t remember the name. Them stage people has names they
change as often as their rooms. They comes and they goes. No, I don’t call
that one to mind.”
No. Always no. Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the inevitable
negative. So much time spent by day in questioning managers, agents,
schools and choruses; by night among the audiences of theatres from all-
star casts down to music halls so low that he dreaded to find what he most
hoped for. He who had loved her best had tried to find her. He was sure that

since her disappearance from home this great, water-girt city held her
somewhere, but it was like a monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles
constantly, with no foundation, its upper granules of to-day buried to-
morrow in ooze and slime.
The furnished room received its latest guest with a first glow of pseudo-
hospitality, a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the specious smile
of a demirep. The sophistical comfort came in reflected gleams from the
decayed furniture, the ragged brocade upholstery of a couch and two chairs,
a foot-wide cheap pier glass between the two windows, from one or two gilt
picture frames and a brass bedstead in a corner.
The guest reclined, inert, upon a chair, while the room, confused in
speech as though it were an apartment in Babel, tried to discourse to him of
its divers tenantry.
A polychromatic rug like some brilliant-flowered rectangular, tropical
islet lay surrounded by a billowy sea of soiled matting. Upon the gay-
papered wall were those pictures that pursue the homeless one from house
to house—The Huguenot Lovers, The First Quarrel, The Wedding
Breakfast, Psyche at the Fountain. The mantel’s chastely severe outline was
ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn rakishly askew like the
sashes of the Amazonian ballet. Upon it was some desolate flotsam cast
aside by the room’s marooned when a lucky sail had borne them to a fresh
port—a trifling vase or two, pictures of actresses, a medicine bottle, some
stray cards out of a deck.
One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, the little
signs left by the furnished room’s procession of guests developed a
significance. The threadbare space in the rug in front of the dresser told that
lovely woman had marched in the throng. Tiny finger prints on the wall
spoke of little prisoners trying to feel their way to sun and air. A splattered
stain, raying like the shadow of a bursting bomb, witnessed where a hurled
glass or bottle had splintered with its contents against the wall. Across the
pier glass had been scrawled with a diamond in staggering letters the name
“Marie.” It seemed that the succession of dwellers in the furnished room
had turned in fury—perhaps tempted beyond forbearance by its garish
coldness—and wreaked upon it their passions. The furniture was chipped
and bruised; the couch, distorted by bursting springs, seemed a horrible
monster that had been slain during the stress of some grotesque convulsion.

Some more potent upheaval had cloven a great slice from the marble
mantel. Each plank in the floor owned its particular cant and shriek as from
a separate and individual agony. It seemed incredible that all this malice and
injury had been wrought upon the room by those who had called it for a
time their home; and yet it may have been the cheated home instinct
surviving blindly, the resentful rage at false household gods that had
kindled their wrath. A hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and
cherish.
The young tenant in the chair allowed these thoughts to file, soft-shod,
through his mind, while there drifted into the room furnished sounds and
furnished scents. He heard in one room a tittering and incontinent, slack
laughter; in others the monologue of a scold, the rattling of dice, a lullaby,
and one crying dully; above him a banjo tinkled with spirit. Doors banged
somewhere; the elevated trains roared intermittently; a cat yowled
miserably upon a back fence. And he breathed the breath of the house—a
dank savour rather than a smell—a cold, musty effluvium as from
underground vaults mingled with the reeking exhalations of linoleum and
mildewed and rotten woodwork.
Then, suddenly, as he rested there, the room was filled with the strong,
sweet odour of mignonette. It came as upon a single buffet of wind with
such sureness and fragrance and emphasis that it almost seemed a living
visitant. And the man cried aloud: “What, dear?” as if he had been called,
and sprang up and faced about. The rich odour clung to him and wrapped
him around. He reached out his arms for it, all his senses for the time
confused and commingled. How could one be peremptorily called by an
odour? Surely it must have been a sound. But, was it not the sound that had
touched, that had caressed him?
“She has been in this room,” he cried, and he sprang to wrest from it a
token, for he knew he would recognize the smallest thing that had belonged
to her or that she had touched. This enveloping scent of mignonette, the
odour that she had loved and made her own—whence came it?
The room had been but carelessly set in order. Scattered upon the flimsy
dresser scarf were half a dozen hairpins—those discreet, indistinguishable
friends of womankind, feminine of gender, infinite of mood and
uncommunicative of tense. These he ignored, conscious of their triumphant
lack of identity. Ransacking the drawers of the dresser he came upon a

discarded, tiny, ragged handkerchief. He pressed it to his face. It was racy
and insolent with heliotrope; he hurled it to the floor. In another drawer he
found odd buttons, a theatre programme, a pawnbroker’s card, two lost
marshmallows, a book on the divination of dreams. In the last was a
woman’s black satin hair bow, which halted him, poised between ice and
fire. But the black satin hair-bow also is femininity’s demure, impersonal,
common ornament, and tells no tales.
And then he traversed the room like a hound on the scent, skimming the
walls, considering the corners of the bulging matting on his hands and
knees, rummaging mantel and tables, the curtains and hangings, the
drunken cabinet in the corner, for a visible sign, unable to perceive that she
was there beside, around, against, within, above him, clinging to him,
wooing him, calling him so poignantly through the finer senses that even
his grosser ones became cognisant of the call. Once again he answered
loudly: “Yes, dear!” and turned, wild-eyed, to gaze on vacancy, for he could
not yet discern form and colour and love and outstretched arms in the odour
of mignonette. Oh, God! whence that odour, and since when have odours
had a voice to call? Thus he groped.
He burrowed in crevices and corners, and found corks and cigarettes.
These he passed in passive contempt. But once he found in a fold of the
matting a half-smoked cigar, and this he ground beneath his heel with a
green and trenchant oath. He sifted the room from end to end. He found
dreary and ignoble small records of many a peripatetic tenant; but of her
whom he sought, and who may have lodged there, and whose spirit seemed
to hover there, he found no trace.
And then he thought of the housekeeper.
He ran from the haunted room downstairs and to a door that showed a
crack of light. She came out to his knock. He smothered his excitement as
best he could.
“Will you tell me, madam,” he besought her, “who occupied the room I
have before I came?”
“Yes, sir. I can tell you again. ’Twas Sprowls and Mooney, as I said. Miss
B’retta Sprowls it was in the theatres, but Missis Mooney she was. My
house is well known for respectability. The marriage certificate hung,
framed, on a nail over—”
“What kind of a lady was Miss Sprowls—in looks, I mean?”

“Why, black-haired, sir, short, and stout, with a comical face. They left a
week ago Tuesday.”
“And before they occupied it?”
“Why, there was a single gentleman connected with the draying business.
He left owing me a week. Before him was Missis Crowder and her two
children, that stayed four months; and back of them was old Mr. Doyle,
whose sons paid for him. He kept the room six months. That goes back a
year, sir, and further I do not remember.”
He thanked her and crept back to his room. The room was dead. The
essence that had vivified it was gone. The perfume of mignonette had
departed. In its place was the old, stale odour of mouldy house furniture, of
atmosphere in storage.
The ebbing of his hope drained his faith. He sat staring at the yellow,
singing gaslight. Soon he walked to the bed and began to tear the sheets into
strips. With the blade of his knife he drove them tightly into every crevice
around windows and door. When all was snug and taut he turned out the
light, turned the gas full on again and laid himself gratefully upon the bed.

It was Mrs. McCool’s night to go with the can for beer. So she fetched it
and sat with Mrs. Purdy in one of those subterranean retreats where house-
keepers foregather and the worm dieth seldom.
“I rented out my third floor, back, this evening,” said Mrs. Purdy, across
a fine circle of foam. “A young man took it. He went up to bed two hours
ago.”
“Now, did ye, Mrs. Purdy, ma’am?” said Mrs. McCool, with intense
admiration. “You do be a wonder for rentin’ rooms of that kind. And did ye
tell him, then?” she concluded in a husky whisper, laden with mystery.
“Rooms,” said Mrs. Purdy, in her furriest tones, “are furnished for to rent.
I did not tell him, Mrs. McCool.”
“’Tis right ye are, ma’am; ’tis by renting rooms we kape alive. Ye have
the rale sense for business, ma’am. There be many people will rayjict the
rentin’ of a room if they be tould a suicide has been after dyin’ in the bed of
it.”

“As you say, we has our living to be making,” remarked Mrs. Purdy.
“Yis, ma’am; ’tis true. ’Tis just one wake ago this day I helped ye lay out
the third floor, back. A pretty slip of a colleen she was to be killin’ herself
wid the gas—a swate little face she had, Mrs. Purdy, ma’am.”
“She’d a-been called handsome, as you say,” said Mrs. Purdy, assenting
but critical, “but for that mole she had a-growin’ by her left eyebrow. Do fill
up your glass again, Mrs. McCool.”

THE BRIEF DÉBUT OF TILDY

If you do not know Bogle’s Chop House and Family Restaurant it is your
loss. For if you are one of the fortunate ones who dine expensively you
should be interested to know how the other half consumes provisions. And
if you belong to the half to whom waiters’ checks are things of moment,
you should know Bogle’s, for there you get your money’s worth—in
quantity, at least.
Bogle’s is situated in that highway of bourgeoisie, that boulevard of
Brown-Jones-and-Robinson, Eighth Avenue. There are two rows of tables
in the room, six in each row. On each table is a caster-stand, containing
cruets of condiments and seasons. From the pepper cruet you may shake a
cloud of something tasteless and melancholy, like volcanic dust. From the
salt cruet you may expect nothing. Though a man should extract a
sanguinary stream from the pallid turnip, yet will his prowess be balked
when he comes to wrest salt from Bogle’s cruets. Also upon each table
stands the counterfeit of that benign sauce made “from the recipe of a
nobleman in India.”
At the cashier’s desk sits Bogle, cold, sordid, slow, smouldering, and
takes your money. Behind a mountain of toothpicks he makes your change,
files your check, and ejects at you, like a toad, a word about the weather.
Beyond a corroboration of his meteorological statement you would better
not venture. You are not Bogle’s friend; you are a fed, transient customer,
and you and he may not meet again until the blowing of Gabriel’s dinner
horn. So take your change and go—to the devil if you like. There you have
Bogle’s sentiments.
The needs of Bogle’s customers were supplied by two waitresses and a
Voice. One of the waitresses was named Aileen. She was tall, beautiful,
lively, gracious and learned in persiflage. Her other name? There was no
more necessity for another name at Bogle’s than there was for finger-bowls.

The name of the other waitress was Tildy. Why do you suggest Matilda?
Please listen this time—Tildy—Tildy. Tildy was dumpy, plain-faced, and
too anxious to please to please. Repeat the last clause to yourself once or
twice, and make the acquaintance of the duplicate infinite.
The Voice at Bogle’s was invisible. It came from the kitchen, and did not
shine in the way of originality. It was a heathen Voice, and contented itself
with vain repetitions of exclamations emitted by the waitresses concerning
food.
Will it tire you to be told again that Aileen was beautiful? Had she
donned a few hundred dollars’ worth of clothes and joined the Easter
parade, and had you seen her, you would have hastened to say so yourself.
The customers at Bogle’s were her slaves. Six tables full she could wait
upon at once. They who were in a hurry restrained their impatience for the
joy of merely gazing upon her swiftly moving, graceful figure. They who
had finished eating ate more that they might continue in the light of her
smiles. Every man there—and they were mostly men—tried to make his
impression upon her.
Aileen could successfully exchange repartee against a dozen at once. And
every smile that she sent forth lodged, like pellets from a scatter-gun, in as
many hearts. And all this while she would be performing astounding feats
with orders of pork and beans, pot roasts, ham-and, sausage-and-the-
wheats, and any quantity of things on the iron and in the pan and straight up
and on the side. With all this feasting and flirting and merry exchange of wit
Bogle’s came mighty near being a salon, with Aileen for its Madame
Récamier.
If the transients were entranced by the fascinating Aileen, the regulars
were her adorers. There was much rivalry among many of the steady
customers. Aileen could have had an engagement every evening. At least
twice a week some one took her to a theatre or to a dance. One stout
gentleman whom she and Tildy had privately christened “The Hog”
presented her with a turquoise ring. Another one known as “Freshy,” who
rode on the Traction Company’s repair wagon, was going to give her a
poodle as soon as his brother got the hauling contract in the Ninth. And the
man who always ate spareribs and spinach and said he was a stock broker
asked her to go to “Parsifal” with him.

“I don’t know where this place is,” said Aileen while talking it over with
Tildy, “but the wedding-ring’s got to be on before I put a stitch into a
travelling dress—ain’t that right? Well, I guess!”
But, Tildy!
In steaming, chattering, cabbage-scented Bogle’s there was almost a heart
tragedy. Tildy with the blunt nose, the hay-coloured hair, the freckled skin,
the bag-o’-meal figure, had never had an admirer. Not a man followed her
with his eyes when she went to and fro in the restaurant save now and then
when they glared with the beast-hunger for food. None of them bantered her
gaily to coquettish interchanges of wit. None of them loudly “jollied” her of
mornings as they did Aileen, accusing her, when the eggs were slow in
coming, of late hours in the company of envied swains. No one had ever
given her a turquoise ring or invited her upon a voyage to mysterious,
distant “Parsifal.”
Tildy was a good waitress, and the men tolerated her. They who sat at her
tables spoke to her briefly with quotations from the bill of fare; and then
raised their voices in honeyed and otherwise-flavoured accents, eloquently
addressed to the fair Aileen. They writhed in their chairs to gaze around and
over the impending form of Tildy, that Aileen’s pulchritude might season
and make ambrosia of their bacon and eggs.
And Tildy was content to be the unwooed drudge if Aileen could receive
the flattery and the homage. The blunt nose was loyal to the short Grecian.
She was Aileen’s friend; and she was glad to see her rule hearts and wean
the attention of men from smoking pot-pie and lemon meringue. But deep
below our freckles and hay-coloured hair the unhandsomest of us dream of
a prince or a princess, not vicarious, but coming to us alone.
There was a morning when Aileen tripped in to work with a slightly
bruised eye; and Tildy’s solicitude was almost enough to heal any optic.
“Fresh guy,” explained Aileen, “last night as I was going home at
Twenty-third and Sixth. Sashayed up, so he did, and made a break. I turned
him down, cold, and he made a sneak; but followed me down to Eighteenth,
and tried his hot air again. Gee! but I slapped him a good one, side of the
face. Then he give me that eye. Does it look real awful, Til? I should hate
that Mr. Nicholson should see it when he comes in for his tea and toast at
ten.”

Tildy listened to the adventure with breathless admiration. No man had
ever tried to follow her. She was safe abroad at any hour of the twenty-four.
What bliss it must have been to have had a man follow one and black one’s
eye for love!
Among the customers at Bogle’s was a young man named Seeders, who
worked in a laundry office. Mr. Seeders was thin and had light hair, and
appeared to have been recently rough-dried and starched. He was too
diffident to aspire to Aileen’s notice; so he usually sat at one of Tildy’s
tables, where he devoted himself to silence and boiled weakfish.
One day when Mr. Seeders came in to dinner he had been drinking beer.
There were only two or three customers in the restaurant. When Mr. Seeders
had finished his weakfish he got up, put his arm around Tildy’s waist,
kissed her loudly and impudently, walked out upon the street, snapped his
fingers in the direction of the laundry, and hied himself to play pennies in
the slot machines at the Amusement Arcade.
For a few moments Tildy stood petrified. Then she was aware of Aileen
shaking at her an arch forefinger, and saying:
“Why, Til, you naughty girl! Ain’t you getting to be awful, Miss
Slyboots! First thing I know you’ll be stealing some of my fellows. I must
keep an eye on you, my lady.”
Another thing dawned upon Tildy’s recovering wits. In a moment she had
advanced from a hopeless, lowly admirer to be an Eve-sister of the potent
Aileen. She herself was now a man-charmer, a mark for Cupid, a Sabine
who must be coy when the Romans were at their banquet boards. Man had
found her waist achievable and her lips desirable. The sudden and amatory
Seeders had, as it were, performed for her a miraculous piece of one-day
laundry work. He had taken the sackcloth of her uncomeliness, had washed,
dried, starched and ironed it, and returned it to her sheer embroidered lawn
—the robe of Venus herself.
The freckles on Tildy’s cheeks merged into a rosy flush. Now both Circe
and Psyche peeped from her brightened eyes. Not even Aileen herself had
been publicly embraced and kissed in the restaurant.
Tildy could not keep the delightful secret. When trade was slack she went
and stood at Bogle’s desk. Her eyes were shining; she tried not to let her
words sound proud and boastful.

“A gentleman insulted me to-day,” she said. “He hugged me around the
waist and kissed me.”
“That so?” said Bogle, cracking open his business armour. “After this
week you get a dollar a week more.”
At the next regular meal when Tildy set food before customers with
whom she had acquaintance she said to each of them modestly, as one
whose merit needed no bolstering:
“A gentleman insulted me to-day in the restaurant. He put his arm around
my waist and kissed me.”
The diners accepted the revelation in various ways—some incredulously,
some with congratulations; others turned upon her the stream of badinage
that had hitherto been directed at Aileen alone. And Tildy’s heart swelled in
her bosom, for she saw at last the towers of Romance rise above the horizon
of the grey plain in which she had for so long travelled.
For two days Mr. Seeders came not again. During that time Tildy
established herself firmly as a woman to be wooed. She bought ribbons, and
arranged her hair like Aileen’s, and tightened her waist two inches. She had
a thrilling but delightful fear that Mr. Seeders would rush in suddenly and
shoot her with a pistol. He must have loved her desperately; and impulsive
lovers are always blindly jealous.
Even Aileen had not been shot at with a pistol. And then Tildy rather
hoped that he would not shoot at her, for she was always loyal to Aileen;
and she did not want to overshadow her friend.
At 4 o’clock on the afternoon of the third day Mr. Seeders came in. There
were no customers at the tables. At the back end of the restaurant Tildy was
refilling the mustard pots and Aileen was quartering pies. Mr. Seeders
walked back to where they stood.
Tildy looked up and saw him, gasped, and pressed the mustard spoon
against her heart. A red hair-bow was in her hair; she wore Venus’s Eighth
Avenue badge, the blue bead necklace with the swinging silver symbolic
heart.
Mr. Seeders was flushed and embarrassed. He plunged one hand into his
hip pocket and the other into a fresh pumpkin pie.
“Miss Tildy,” said he, “I want to apologise for what I done the other
evenin’. Tell you the truth, I was pretty well tanked up or I wouldn’t of done

it. I wouldn’t do no lady that a-way when I was sober. So I hope, Miss
Tildy, you’ll accept my ’pology, and believe that I wouldn’t of done it if I’d
known what I was doin’ and hadn’t of been drunk.”
With this handsome plea Mr. Seeders backed away, and departed, feeling
that reparation had been made.
But behind the convenient screen Tildy had thrown herself flat upon a
table among the butter chips and the coffee cups, and was sobbing her heart
out—out and back again to the grey plain wherein travel they with blunt
noses and hay-coloured hair. From her knot she had torn the red hair-bow
and cast it upon the floor. Seeders she despised utterly; she had but taken
his kiss as that of a pioneer and prophetic prince who might have set the
clocks going and the pages to running in fairyland. But the kiss had been
maudlin and unmeant; the court had not stirred at the false alarm; she must
forevermore remain the Sleeping Beauty.
Yet not all was lost. Aileen’s arm was around her; and Tildy’s red hand
groped among the butter chips till it found the warm clasp of her friend’s.
“Don’t you fret, Til,” said Aileen, who did not understand entirely. “That
turnip-faced little clothespin of a Seeders ain’t worth it. He ain’t anything of
a gentleman or he wouldn’t ever of apologised.”

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