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Title:  The Four Million

Author:  by O Henry

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The Four Million

by O Henry




~Not very long ago some one invented the assertion that there were
only "Four Hundred" people in New York City who were really worth
noticing.  But a wiser man has arisen--the census taker--and his
larger estimate of  human interest has been preferred in marking out
the field of these little stories of the "Four Million."~



Contents:

TOBIN'S PALM
THE GIFT OF THE MAGI
A COSMOPOLITE IN A CAFE
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 A 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 DEBUT 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 Tohin'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 mound
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'l1 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 be 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 cafe, 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 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 them 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 CAFE

At midnight the cafe 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 ~garcons~, the music wisely catering to all with its
raids upon the composers; the ~melange~ of talk and laughter--and,
if you will, the Wurzburger 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'hote~ 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 cafes 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 cafes 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 Wurzburgers 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 goatherder 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 spo--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 grandaunt 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 Wurzburger 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 cafe.  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 ~garcons~, 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; handorgans, 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. MeCaskey, 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 entree.  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'hoter~.  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 loot 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 shoulders 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
7x8 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 8x10 (inches) centre table of
the 8x10 (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 portieres.  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.  "Were 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 Twentyfourth 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

Eevery 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 twostep, 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 paperbox
maiden to his conquering chariot scorned to employ Beau Brumme1 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 be 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 sixpound
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 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'11 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 polisbed 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 bad 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' 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 estatc 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 cafe 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
undcrstood 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 havc been
classified long ago.  In his wake spring up wine agents and cloak
models; and the orchestra 'p1ays 'Let's All Go Up to Maud's' for him,
by request, instead of Handel.  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 typica1 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 cafe, 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
cafe 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 readymade 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 end 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
boliworm, 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 T, 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 Kiondiker, 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 Kiondiker 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 cafe, 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 Pelee 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 expcctcd 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 fiat 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, eggstealing 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 prcscription 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 g1ace.  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'11 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 bit the
fire-escape on time to a second, and we was under the wire at the
Reverend's at 9.3O 1/4.  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 Rockwail, "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 encyc1opaedia 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 apo1ogised, 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 Thirly-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 thcmselves
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 $3OO 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 A 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 ball-
roomed.  One evening after dining at Schulenberg's 40-cent, five-
course ~table d'hote~ (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 entrees, 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 ~diminuendo 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 midgets 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'hote~.  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'hote~.

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 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 redhot 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 seemcd 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 Cafe.  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 boardinghouse.  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 he 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 he 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 depeopled 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 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 to 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 debut; 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
~habitues~ 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'hotes~, 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 raggcd brocade
upholstery of a couch and two chairs, a footwide 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 hairbow 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
hangngs, 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 mnignonette.  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 DEBUT 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 wili 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 Recamier.

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
"Fresby," 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."





End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Four Million, by O Henry

