Usually it is a cold day in July when you can stroll up Broadway
in that month and get a story out of the drama. I found one a few
breathless, parboiling days ago, and it seems to decide a serious
question in art.

There was not a soul left in the city except Hollis and me–and two
or three million sunworshippers who remained at desks and counters.
The elect had fled to seashore, lake, and mountain, and had already
begun to draw for additional funds. Every evening Hollis and I
prowled about the deserted town searching for coolness in empty
cafes, dining-rooms, and roofgardens. We knew to the tenth part of a
revolution the speed of every electric fan in Gotham, and we followed
the swiftest as they varied. Hollis’s fiancee. Miss Loris Sherman,
had been in the Adirondacks, at Lower Saranac Lake, for a month. In
another week he would join her party there. In the meantime, he
cursed the city cheerfully and optimistically, and sought my society
because I suffered him to show me her photograph during the black
coffee every time we dined together.

My revenge was to read to him my one-act play.

It was one insufferable evening when the overplus of the day’s heat
was being hurled quiveringly back to the heavens by every surcharged
brick and stone and inch of iron in the panting town. But with the
cunning of the two-legged beasts we had found an oasis where the
hoofs of Apollo’s steed had not been allowed to strike. Our seats
were on an ocean of cool, polished oak; the white linen of fifty
deserted tables flapped like seagulls in the artificial breeze; a
mile away a waiter lingered for a heliographic signal–we might have
roared songs there or fought a duel without molestation.

Out came Miss Loris’s photo with the coffee, and I once more praised
the elegant poise of the neck, the extremely low-coiled mass of heavy
hair, and the eyes that followed one, like those in an oil painting.

“She’s the greatest ever,” said Hollis, with enthusiasm. “Good as
Great Northern Preferred, and a disposition built like a watch. One
week more and I’ll be happy Jonny-on-the-spot. Old Tom Tolliver, my
best college chum, went up there two weeks ago. He writes me that
Loris doesn’t talk about anything but me. Oh, I guess Rip Van Winkle
didn’t have all the good luck!”

“Yes, yes,” said I, hurriedly, pulling out my typewritten play.
“She’s no doubt a charming girl. Now, here’s that little curtain-
raiser you promised to listen to.”

“Ever been tried on the stage?” asked Hollis.

“Not exactly,” I answered. “I read half of it the other day to a
fellow whose brother knows Robert Edeson; but he had to catch a train
before I finished.”

“Go on,” said Hollis, sliding back in his chair like a good fellow.
“I’m no stage carpenter, but I’ll tell you what I think of it from a
first-row balcony standpoint. I’m a theatre bug during the season,
and I can size up a fake play almost as quick as the gallery can.
Flag the waiter once more, and then go ahead as hard as you like with
it. I’ll be the dog.”

I read my little play lovingly, and, I fear, not without some
elocution. There was one scene in it that I believed in greatly.
The comedy swiftly rises into thrilling and unexpectedly developed
drama. Capt. Marchmont suddenly becomes cognizant that his wife is
an unscrupulous adventuress, who has deceived him from the day of
their first meeting. The rapid and mortal duel between them from that
moment–she with her magnificent lies and siren charm, winding about
him like a serpent, trying to recover her lost ground; he with his
man’s agony and scorn and lost faith, trying to tear her from his
heart. That scene I always thought was a crackerjack. When Capt.
Marchmont discovers her duplicity by reading on a blotter in a mirror
the impression of a note that she has written to the Count, he raises
his hand to heaven and exclaims: “O God, who created woman while Adam
slept, and gave her to him for a companion, take back Thy gift and
return instead the sleep, though it last forever!”

“Rot,” said Hollis, rudely, when I had given those lines with proper
emphasis.

“I beg your pardon!” I said, as sweetly as I could.

“Come now,” went on Hollis, “don’t be an idiot. You know very well
that nobody spouts any stuff like that these days. That sketch went
along all right until you rang in the skyrockets. Cut out that
right-arm exercise and the Adam and Eve stunt, and make your captain
talk as you or I or Bill Jones would.”

“I’ll admit,” said I, earnestly (for my theory was being touched
upon), “that on all ordinary occasions all of us use commonplace
language to convey our thoughts. You will rememberthat up to the
moment when the captain makes his terrible discovery all the
characters on the stage talk pretty much as they would, in real life.
But I believe that I am right in allowing him lines suitable to the
strong and tragic situation into which he falls.”

“Tragic, my eye!” said my friend, irreverently. “In Shakespeare’s
day he might have sputtered out some high-cockalorum nonsense of
that sort, because in those days they ordered ham and eggs in blank
verse and discharged the cook with an epic. But not for B’way in
the summer of 1905!”

“It is my opinion,” said I, “that great human emotions shake up our
vocabulary and leave the words best suited to express them on top. A
sudden violent grief or loss or disappointment will bring expressions
out of an ordinary man as strong and solemn and dramatic as those used
in fiction or on the stage to portray those emotions.”

“That’s where you fellows are wrong,” said Hollis. “Plain, every-day
talk is what goes. Your captain would very likely have kicked the
cat, lit a cigar, stirred up a highball, and telephoned for a lawyer,
instead of getting off those Robert Mantell pyrotechnics.”

“Possibly, a little later,” I continued. “But just at the time–just
as the blow is delivered, if something Scriptural or theatrical and
deep-tongued isn’t wrung from a man in spite of his modern and
practical way of speaking, then I’m wrong.”

“Of course,” said Hollis, kindly, “you’ve got to whoop her up some
degrees for the stage. The audience expects it. When the villain
kidnaps little Effie you have to make her mother claw some chunks out
of the atmosphere, and scream: “Me chee-ild, me chee-ild!” What she
would actually do would be to call up the police by ‘phone, ring for
some strong tea, and get the little darling’s photo out, ready for
the reporters. When you get your villain in a corner–a stage corner
–it’s all right for him to clap his hand to his forehead and hiss:
“All is lost!” Off the stage he would remark: “This is a conspiracy
against me– I refer you to my lawyers.’”

“I get no consolation,” said I, gloomily, “from your concession of an
accentuated stage treatment. In my play I fondly hoped that I was
following life. If people in real life meet great crises in a
commonplace way, they should do the same on the stage.”

And then we drifted, like two trout, out of our cool pool in the great
hotel and began to nibble languidly at the gay flies in the swift
current of Broadway. And our question of dramatic art was unsettled.

We nibbled at the flies, and avoided the hooks, as wise trout do; but
soon the weariness of Manhattan in summer overcame us. Nine stories
up, facing the south, was Hollis’s apartment, and we soon stepped into
an elevator bound for that cooler haven.

I was familiar in those quarters, and quickly my play was forgotten,
and I stood at a sideboard mixing things, with cracked ice and
glasses all about me. A breeze from the bay came in the windows not
altogether blighted by the asphalt furnace over which it had passed.
Hollis, whistling softly, turned over a late-arrived letter or two
on his table, and drew around the coolest wicker armchairs.

I was just measuring the Vermouth carefully when I heard a sound.
Some man’s voice groaned hoarsely: “False, oh, God!–false, and
Love is a lie and friendship but the byword of devils!”

I looked around quickly. Hollis lay across the table with his head
down upon his outstretched arms. And then he looked up at me and
laughed in his ordinary manner.

I knew him–he was poking fun at me about my theory. And it did seem
so unnatural, those swelling words during our quiet gossip, that I
half began to believe I had been mistaken–that my theory was wrong.

Hollis raised himself slowly from the table.

“You were right about that theatrical business, old man,” he said,
quietly, as he tossed a note to me.

I read it.

Loris had run away with Tom Tolliver.

I was walking in Central Park with Avery Knight, the great New York
burglar, highwayman, and murderer.

“But, my dear Knight,” said I, “it sounds incredible. You have
undoubtedly performed some of the most wonderful feats in your
profession known to modern crime. You have committed some marvellous
deeds under the very noses of the police–you have boldly entered the
homes of millionaires and held them up with an empty gun while you
made free with their silver and jewels; you have sandbagged citizens
in the glare of Broadway’s electric lights; you have killed and robbed
with superb openness and absolute impunity–but when you boast that
within forty-eight hours after committing a murder you can run down
and actually bring me face to face with the detective assigned to
apprehend you, I must beg leave to express my doubts–remember, you
are in New York.”

Avery Knight smiled indulgently.

“You pique my professional pride, doctor,” he said in a nettled
tone. “I will convince you.”

About twelve yards in advance of us a prosperous-looking citizen was
rounding a clump of bushes where the walk curved. Knight suddenly
drew a revolver and shot the man in the back. His victim fell and
lay without moving.

The great murderer went up to him leisurely and took from his clothes
his money, watch, and a valuable ring and cravat pin. He then
rejoined me smiling calmly, and we continued our walk.

Ten steps and we met a policeman running toward the spot where the
shot had been fired. Avery Knight stopped him.

“I have just killed a man,” he announced, seriously, “and robbed him
of his possessions.”

“G’wan,” said the policeman, angrily, “or I’ll run yez in! Want yer
name in the papers, don’t yez? I never knew the cranks to come around
so quick after a shootin’ before. Out of th’ park, now, for yours, or
I’ll fan yez.”

“What you have done,” I said, argumentatively, as Knight and I walked
on, “was easy. But when you come to the task of hunting down the
detective that they send upon your trail you will find that you have
undertaken a difficult feat.”

“Perhaps so,” said Knight, lightly. “I will admit that my success
depends in a degree upon the sort of man they start after me. If it
should be an ordinary plain-clothes man I might fail to gain a sight
of him. If they honor me by giving the case to some one of their
celebrated sleuths I do not fear to match my cunning and powers of
induction against his.”

On the next afternoon Knight entered my office with a satisfied look
on his keen countenance.

“How goes the mysterious murder?” I asked.

“As usual,” said Knight, smilingly. “I have put in the morning at the
police station and at the inquest. It seems that a card case of mine
containing cards with my name and address was found near the body.
They have three witnesses who saw the shooting and gave a description
of me. The case has been placed in the hands of Shamrock Jolnes, the
famous detective. He left Headquarters at 11:30 on the assignment.
I waited at my address until two, thinking he might call there.”

I laughed, tauntingly.

“You will never see Jolnes,” I continued, “until this murder has been
forgotten, two or three weeks from now. I had a better opinion of
your shrewdness, Knight. During the three hours and a half that you
waited he has got out of your ken. He is after you on true induction
theories now, and no wrongdoer has yet been known to come upon him
while thus engaged. I advise you to give it up.”

“Doctor,” said Knight, with a sudden glint in his keen gray eye and
a squaring of his chin, “in spite of the record your city holds of
something like a dozen homicides without a subsequent meeting of the
perpetrator, and the sleuth in charge of the case, I will undertake
to break that record. To-morrow I will take you to Shamrock Jolnes–
I will unmask him before you and prove to you that it is not an
impossibility for an officer of the law and a manslayer to stand face
to face in your city.”

“Do it,” said I, “and you’ll have the sincere thanks of the Police
Department.”

On the next day Knight called for me in a cab.

“I’ve been on one or two false scents, doctor,” he admitted. “I know
something of detectives’ methods, and I followed out a few of them,
expecting to find Jolnes at the other end. The pistol being a .45-
caliber, I thought surely I would find him at work on the clue in
Forty-fifth Street. Then, again, I looked for the detective at the
Columbia University, as the man’s being shot in the back naturally
suggested hazing. But I could not find a trace of him.”

“–Nor will you,” I said, emphatically.

“Not by ordinary methods,” said Knight. “I might walk up and down
Broadway for a month without success. But you have aroused my pride,
doctor; and if I fail to show you Shamrock Jolnes this day, I promise
you I will never kill or rob in your city again.”

“Nonsense, man,” I replied. “When our burglars walk into our houses
and politely demand, thousands of dollars’ worth of jewels, and then
dine and bang the piano an hour or two before leaving, how do you, a
mere murderer, expect to come in contact with the detective that is
looking for you?”

Avery Knight, sat lost in thought for a while. At length he looked
up brightly.

“Doc,” said he, “I have it. Put on your hat, and come with me. In
half an hour I guarantee that you shall stand in the presence of
Shamrock Jolnes.”

I entered a cab with Avery Knight. I did not hear his instructions
to the driver, but the vehicle set out at a smart pace up Broadway,
turning presently into Fifth Avenue, and proceeding northward again.
It was with a rapidly beating heart that I accompanied this wonderful
and gifted assassin, whose analytical genius and superb self-
confidence had prompted him to make me the tremendous promise of
bringing me into the presence of a murderer and the New York detective
in pursuit of him simultaneously. Even yet I could not believe it
possible.

“Are you sure that you are not being led into some trap?” I asked.
“Suppose that your clue, whatever it is, should bring us only into
the presence of the Commissioner of Police and a couple of dozen
cops!”

“My dear doctor,” said Knight, a little stiffly. “I would remind you
that I am no gambler.”

“I beg your pardon,” said I. “But I do not think you will find
Jolnes.”

The cab stopped before one of the handsomest residences on the avenue.
Walking up and down in front of the house was a man with long red
whiskers, with a detective’s badge showing on the lapel of his coat.
Now and then the man would remove his whiskers to wipe his face, and
then I would recognize at once the well-known features of the great
New York detective. Jolnes was keeping a sharp watch upon the doors
and windows of the house.

“Well, doctor,” said Knight, unable to repress a note of triumph in
his voice, “have you seen?”

“It is wonderful–wonderful!” I could not help exclaiming as our cab
started on its return trip. “But how did you do it? By what process
of induction–”

“My dear doctor,” interrupted the great murderer, “the inductive
theory is what the detectives use. My process is more modern. I
call it the saltatorial theory. Without bothering with the tedious
mental phenomena necessary to the solution of a mystery from slight
clues, I jump at once to a conclusion. I will explain to you the
method I employed in this case.

“In the first place, I argued that as the crime was committed in New
York City in broad daylight, in a public place and under peculiarly
atrocious circumstances, and that as the most skilful sleuth
available was let loose upon the case, the perpetrator would never
be discovered. Do you not think my postulation justified by
precedent?”

“Perhaps so,” I replied, doggedly. “But if Big Bill Dev–”

“Stop that,” interrupted Knight, with a smile, “I’ve heard that
several times. It’s too late now. I will proceed.

“If homicides in New York went undiscovered, I reasoned, although
the best detective talent was employed to ferret them out, it must
be true that the detectives went about their work in the wrong way.
And not only in the wrong way, but exactly opposite from the right
way. That was my clue.

“I slew the man in Central Park. Now, let me describe myself to you.

“I am tall, with a black beard, and I hate publicity. I have no money
to speak of; I do not like oatmeal, and it is the one ambition of my
life to die rich. I am of a cold and heartless disposition. I do not
care for my fellowmen and I never give a cent to beggars or charity.

“Now, my dear doctor, that is the true description of myself, the man
whom that shrewd detective was to hunt down. You who are familiar
with the history of crime in New York of late should be able to
foretell the result. When I promised you to exhibit to your
incredulous gaze the sleuth who was set upon me, you laughed at me
because you said that detectives and murderers never met in New York.
I have demonstrated to you that the theory is possible.”

“But how did you do it?” I asked again.

“It was very simple,” replied the distinguished murderer. “I
assumed that the detective would go exactly opposite to the clues
he had. I have given you a description of myself. Therefore, he
must necessarily set to work and trail a short man with a white
beard who likes to be in the papers, who is very wealthy, is fond
‘of oatmeal, wants to die poor, and is of an extremely generous
and philanthropic disposition. When thus far is reached the mind
hesitates no longer. I conveyed you at once to the spot where
Shamrock Jolnes was piping off Andrew Carnegie’s residence.”

“Knight,” said I, “you’re a wonder. If there was no danger of your
reforming, what a rounds man you’d make for the Nineteenth Precinct!”

“The dispositions of woman,” said Jeff Peters, after various opinions
on the subject had been advanced, “run, regular, to diversions. What a
woman wants is what you’re out of. She wants more of a thing when it’s
scarce. She likes to have souvenirs of things that never happened. She
likes to be reminded of things she never heard of. A one-sided view of
objects is disjointing to the female composition.

“‘Tis a misfortune of mine, begotten by nature and travel,” continued
Jeff, looking thoughtfully between his elevated feet at the grocery
stove, “to look deeper into some subjects than most people do. I’ve
breathed gasoline smoke talking to street crowds in nearly every town
in the United States. I’ve held ‘em spellbound with music, oratory,
sleight of hand, and prevarications, while I’ve sold ‘em jewelry,
medicine, soap, hair tonic, and junk of other nominations. And during
my travels, as a matter of recreation and expiation, I’ve taken
cognisance some of women. It takes a man a lifetime to find out about
one particular woman; but if he puts in, say, ten years, industrious
and curious, he can acquire the general rudiments of the sex. One
lesson I picked up was when I was working the West with a line of
Brazilian diamonds and a patent fire kindler just after my trip from
Savannah down through the cotton belt with Dalby’s Anti-explosive Lamp
Oil Powder. ‘Twas when the Oklahoma country was in first bloom.
Guthrie was rising in the middle of it like a lump of self-raising
dough. It was a boom town of the regular kind–you stood in line to
get a chance to wash your face; if you ate over ten minutes you had a
lodging bill added on; if you slept on a plank at night they charged
it to you as board the next morning.

“By nature and doctrines I am addicted to the habit of discovering
choice places wherein to feed. So I looked around and found a
proposition that exactly cut the mustard. I found a restaurant tent
just opened up by an outfit that had drifted in on the tail of the
boom. They had knocked together a box house, where they lived and did
the cooking, and served the meals in a tent pitched against the side.
That tent was joyful with placards on it calculated to redeem the
world-worn pilgrim from the sinfulness of boarding houses and pick-me-
up hotels. ‘Try Mother’s Home-Made Biscuits,’ ‘What’s the Matter with
Our Apple Dumplings and Hard Sauce?’ ‘Hot Cakes and Maple Syrup Like
You Ate When a Boy,’ ‘Our Fried Chicken Never Was Heard to Crow’–
there was literature doomed to please the digestions of man! I said to
myself that mother’s wandering boy should munch there that night. And
so it came to pass. And there is where I contracted my case of Mame
Dugan.

“Old Man Dugan was six feet by one of Indiana loafer, and he spent his
time sitting on his shoulder blades in a rocking-chair in the shanty
memorialising the great corn-crop failure of ‘96. Ma Dugan did the
cooking, and Mame waited on the table.

“As soon as I saw Mame I knew there was a mistake in the census
reports. There wasn’t but one girl in the United States. When you come
to specifications it isn’t easy. She was about the size of an angel,
and she had eyes, and ways about her. When you come to the kind of a
girl she was, you’ll find a belt of ‘em reaching from the Brooklyn
Bridge west as far as the courthouse in Council Bluffs, Ia. They earn
their own living in stores, restaurants, factories, and offices.
They’re chummy and honest and free and tender and sassy, and they look
life straight in the eye. They’ve met man face to face, and discovered
that he’s a poor creature. They’ve dropped to it that the reports in
the Seaside Library about his being a fairy prince lack confirmation.

“Mame was that sort. She was full of life and fun, and breezy; she
passed the repartee with the boarders quick as a wink; you’d have
smothered laughing. I am disinclined to make excavations into the
insides of a personal affection. I am glued to the theory that the
diversions and discrepancies of the indisposition known as love should
be as private a sentiment as a toothbrush. ‘Tis my opinion that the
biographies of the heart should be confined with the historical
romances of the liver to the advertising pages of the magazines. So,
you’ll excuse the lack of an itemised bill of my feelings toward Mame.

“Pretty soon I got a regular habit of dropping into the tent to eat at
irregular times when there wasn’t so many around. Mame would sail in
with a smile, in a black dress and white apron, and say: ‘Hello, Jeff
–why don’t you come at mealtime? Want to see how much trouble you can
be, of course. Friedchickenbeefsteakporkchopshamandeggspotpie’–and so
on. She called me Jeff, but there was no significations attached.
Designations was all she meant. The front names of any of us she used
as they came to hand. I’d eat about two meals before I left, and
string ‘em out like a society spread where they changed plates and
wives, and josh one another festively between bites. Mame stood for
it, pleasant, for it wasn’t up to her to take any canvas off the tent
by declining dollars just because they were whipped in after meal
times.

“It wasn’t long until there was another fellow named Ed Collier got
the between-meals affliction, and him and me put in bridges between
breakfast and dinner, and dinner and supper, that made a three-ringed
circus of that tent, and Mame’s turn as waiter a continuous
performance. That Collier man was saturated with designs and
contrivings. He was in well-boring or insurance or claim-jumping, or
something–I’ve forgotten which. He was a man well lubricated with
gentility, and his words were such as recommended you to his point of
view. So, Collier and me infested the grub tent with care and
activity. Mame was level full of impartiality. ‘Twas like a casino
hand the way she dealt out her favours–one to Collier and one to me
and one to the board, and not a card up her sleeve.

“Me and Collier naturally got acquainted, and gravitated together some
on the outside. Divested of his stratagems, he seemed to be a pleasant
chap, full of an amiable sort of hostility.

“‘I notice you have an affinity for grubbing in the banquet hall after
the guests have fled,’ says I to him one day, to draw his conclusions.

“‘Well, yes,’ says Collier, reflecting; ‘the tumult of a crowded board
seems to harass my sensitive nerves.’

“‘It exasperates mine some, too,’ says I. ‘Nice little girl, don’t you
think?’

“‘I see,’ says Collier, laughing. ‘Well, now that you mention it, I
have noticed that she doesn’t seem to displease the optic nerve.’

“‘She’s a joy to mine,’ says I, ‘and I’m going after her. Notice is
hereby served.’

“‘I’ll be as candid as you,’ admits Collier, ‘and if the drug stores
don’t run out of pepsin I’ll give you a run for your money that’ll
leave you a dyspeptic at the wind-up.’

“So Collier and me begins the race; the grub department lays in new
supplies; Mame waits on us, jolly and kind and agreeable, and it looks
like an even break, with Cupid and the cook working overtime in
Dugan’s restaurant.

“‘Twas one night in September when I got Mame to take a walk after
supper when the things were all cleared away. We strolled out a
distance and sat on a pile of lumber at the edge of town. Such
opportunities was seldom, so I spoke my piece, explaining how the
Brazilian diamonds and the fire kindler were laying up sufficient
treasure to guarantee the happiness of two, and that both of ‘em
together couldn’t equal the light from somebody’s eyes, and that the
name of Dugan should be changed to Peters, or reasons why not would be
in order.

“Mame didn’t say anything right away. Directly she gave a kind of
shudder, and I began to learn something.

“‘Jeff,’ she says, ‘I’m sorry you spoke. I like you as well as any of
them, but there isn’t a man in the world I’d ever marry, and there
never will be. Do you know what a man is in my eye? He’s a tomb. He’s
a sarcophagus for the interment of Beafsteakporkchopsliver’nbaconham-
andeggs. He’s that and nothing more. For two years I’ve watched men
eat, eat, eat, until they represent nothing on earth to me but
ruminant bipeds. They’re absolutely nothing but something that goes in
front of a knife and fork and plate at the table. They’re fixed that
way in my mind and memory. I’ve tried to overcome it, but I can’t.
I’ve heard girls rave about their sweethearts, but I never could
understand it. A man and a sausage grinder and a pantry awake in me
exactly the same sentiments. I went to a matinee once to see an actor
the girls were crazy about. I got interested enough to wonder whether
he liked his steak rare, medium, or well done, and his eggs over or
straight up. That was all. No, Jeff; I’ll marry no man and see him sit
at the breakfast table and eat, and come back to dinner and eat, and
happen in again at supper to eat, eat, eat.’

“‘But, Mame,’ says I, ‘it’ll wear off. You’ve had too much of it.
You’ll marry some time, of course. Men don’t eat always.’

“‘As far as my observation goes, they do. No, I’ll tell you what I’m
going to do.’ Mame turns, sudden, to animation and bright eyes.
‘There’s a girl named Susie Foster in Terre Haute, a chum of mine. She
waits in the railroad eating house there. I worked two years in a
restaurant in that town. Susie has it worse than I do, because the men
who eat at railroad stations gobble. They try to flirt and gobble at
the same time. Whew! Susie and I have it all planned out. We’re saving
our money, and when we get enough we’re going to buy a little cottage
and five acres we know of, and live together, and grow violets for the
Eastern market. A man better not bring his appetite within a mile of
that ranch.’

“‘Don’t girls ever–’ I commenced, but Mame heads me off, sharp.

“‘No, they don’t. They nibble a little bit sometimes; that’s all.’

“‘I thought the confect–’

“‘For goodness’ sake, change the subject,’ says Mame.

“As I said before, that experience puts me wise that the feminine
arrangement ever struggles after deceptions and illusions. Take
England–beef made her; wieners elevated Germany; Uncle Sam owes his
greatness to fried chicken and pie, but the young ladies of the
Shetalkyou schools, they’ll never believe it. Shakespeare, they allow,
and Rubinstein, and the Rough Riders is what did the trick.

“‘Twas a situation calculated to disturb. I couldn’t bear to give up
Mame; and yet it pained me to think of abandoning the practice of
eating. I had acquired the habit too early. For twenty-seven years I
had been blindly rushing upon my fate, yielding to the insidious lures
of that deadly monster, food. It was too late. I was a ruminant biped
for keeps. It was lobster salad to a doughnut that my life was going
to be blighted by it.

“I continued to board at the Dugan tent, hoping that Mame would
relent. I had sufficient faith in true love to believe that since it
has often outlived the absence of a square meal it might, in time,
overcome the presence of one. I went on ministering to my fatal vice,
although I felt that each time I shoved a potato into my mouth in
Mame’s presence I might be burying my fondest hopes.

“I think Collier must have spoken to Mame and got the same answer, for
one day he orders a cup of coffee and a cracker, and sits nibbling the
corner of it like a girl in the parlour, that’s filled up in the
kitchen, previous, on cold roast and fried cabbage. I caught on and
did the same, and maybe we thought we’d made a hit! The next day we
tried it again, and out comes old man Dugan fetching in his hands the
fairy viands.

“‘Kinder off yer feed, ain’t ye, gents?’ he asks, fatherly and some
sardonic. ‘Thought I’d spell Mame a bit, seein’ the work was light,
and my rheumatiz can stand the strain.’

“So back me and Collier had to drop to the heavy grub again. I noticed
about that time that I was seized by a most uncommon and devastating
appetite. I ate until Mame must have hated to see me darken the door.
Afterward I found out that I had been made the victim of the first
dark and irreligious trick played on me by Ed Collier. Him and me had
been taking drinks together uptown regular, trying to drown our thirst
for food. That man had bribed about ten bartenders to always put a big
slug of Appletree’s Anaconda Appetite Bitters in every one of my
drinks. But the last trick he played me was hardest to forget.

“One day Collier failed to show up at the tent. A man told me he left
town that morning. My only rival now was the bill of fare. A few days
before he left Collier had presented me with a two-gallon jug of fine
whisky which he said a cousin had sent him from Kentucky. I now have
reason to believe that it contained Appletree’s Anaconda Appetite
Bitters almost exclusively. I continued to devour tons of provisions.
In Mame’s eyes I remained a mere biped, more ruminant than ever.

“About a week after Collier pulled his freight there came a kind of
side-show to town, and hoisted a tent near the railroad. I judged it
was a sort of fake museum and curiosity business. I called to see Mame
one night, and Ma Dugan said that she and Thomas, her younger brother,
had gone to the show. That same thing happened for three nights that
week. Saturday night I caught her on the way coming back, and got to
sit on the steps a while and talk to her. I noticed she looked
different. Her eyes were softer, and shiny like. Instead of a Mame
Dugan to fly from the voracity of man and raise violets, she seemed to
be a Mame more in line as God intended her, approachable, and suited
to bask in the light of the Brazilians and the Kindler.

“‘You seem to be right smart inveigled,’ says I, ‘with the
Unparalleled Exhibition of the World’s Living Curiosities and
Wonders.’

“‘It’s a change,’ says Mame.

“‘You’ll need another,’ says I, ‘if you keep on going every night.’

“‘Don’t be cross, Jeff,’ says she; ‘it takes my mind off business.’

“‘Don’t the curiosities eat?’ I ask.

“‘Not all of them. Some of them are wax.’

“‘Look out, then, that you don’t get stuck,’ says I, kind of flip and
foolish.

“Mame blushed. I didn’t know what to think about her. My hopes raised
some that perhaps my attentions had palliated man’s awful crime of
visibly introducing nourishment into his system. She talked some about
the stars, referring to them with respect and politeness, and I
drivelled a quantity about united hearts, homes made bright by true
affection, and the Kindler. Mame listened without scorn, and I says to
myself, ‘Jeff, old man, you’re removing the hoodoo that has clung to
the consumer of victuals; you’re setting your heel upon the serpent
that lurks in the gravy bowl.’

“Monday night I drop around. Mame is at the Unparalleled Exhibition
with Thomas.

“‘Now, may the curse of the forty-one seven-sided sea cooks,’ says I,
‘and the bad luck of the nine impenitent grasshoppers rest upon this
self-same sideshow at once and forever more. Amen. I’ll go to see it
myself to-morrow night and investigate its baleful charm. Shall man
that was made to inherit the earth be bereft of his sweetheart first
by a knife and fork and then by a ten-cent circus?’

“The next night before starting out for the exhibition tent I inquire
and find out that Mame is not at home. She is not at the circus with
Thomas this time, for Thomas waylays me in the grass outside of the
grub tent with a scheme of his own before I had time to eat supper.

“‘What’ll you give me, Jeff,’ says he, ‘if I tell you something?’

“‘The value of it, son,’ I says.

“‘Sis is stuck on a freak,’ says Thomas, ‘one of the side-show freaks.
I don’t like him. She does. I overheard ‘em talking. Thought maybe
you’d like to know. Say, Jeff, does it put you wise two dollars’
worth? There’s a target rifle up town that–’

“I frisked my pockets and commenced to dribble a stream of halves and
quarters into Thomas’s hat. The information was of the pile-driver
system of news, and it telescoped my intellects for a while. While I
was leaking small change and smiling foolish on the outside, and
suffering disturbances internally, I was saying, idiotically and
pleasantly:

“‘Thank you, Thomas–thank you–er–a freak, you said, Thomas. Now,
could you make out the monstrosity’s entitlements a little clearer, if
you please, Thomas?’

“‘This is the fellow,’ says Thomas, pulling out a yellow handbill from
his pocket and shoving it under my nose. ‘He’s the Champion Faster of
the Universe. I guess that’s why Sis got soft on him. He don’t eat
nothing. He’s going to fast forty-nine days. This is the sixth. That’s
him.’

“I looked at the name Thomas pointed out–’Professor Eduardo
Collieri.’ ‘Ah!’ says I, in admiration, ‘that’s not so bad, Ed
Collier. I give you credit for the trick. But I don’t give you the
girl until she’s Mrs. Freak.’

“I hit the sod in the direction of the show. I came up to the rear of
the tent, and, as I did so, a man wiggled out like a snake from under
the bottom of the canvas, scrambled to his feet, and ran into me like
a locoed bronco. I gathered him by the neck and investigated him by
the light of the stars. It is Professor Eduardo Collieri, in human
habiliments, with a desperate look in one eye and impatience in the
other.

“‘Hello, Curiosity,’ says I. ‘Get still a minute and let’s have a look
at your freakship. How do you like being the willopus-wallopus or the
bim-bam from Borneo, or whatever name you are denounced by in the
side-show business?’

“‘Jeff Peters,’ says Collier, in a weak voice. ‘Turn me loose, or I’ll
slug you one. I’m in the extremest kind of a large hurry. Hands off!’

“‘Tut, tut, Eddie,’ I answers, holding him hard; ‘let an old friend
gaze on the exhibition of your curiousness. It’s an eminent graft you
fell onto, my son. But don’t speak of assaults and battery, because
you’re not fit. The best you’ve got is a lot of nerve and a mighty
empty stomach.’ And so it was. The man was as weak as a vegetarian
cat.

“‘I’d argue this case with you, Jeff,’ says he, regretful in his
style, ‘for an unlimited number of rounds if I had half an hour to
train in and a slab of beefsteak two feet square to train with. Curse
the man, I say, that invented the art of going foodless. May his soul
in eternity be chained up within two feet of a bottomless pit of red-
hot hash. I’m abandoning the conflict, Jeff; I’m deserting to the
enemy. You’ll find Miss Dugan inside contemplating the only living
mummy and the informed hog. She’s a fine girl, Jeff. I’d have beat you
out if I could have kept up the grubless habit a little while longer.
You’ll have to admit that the fasting dodge was aces-up for a while. I
figured it out that way. But say, Jeff, it’s said that love makes the
world go around. Let me tell you, the announcement lacks verification.
It’s the wind from the dinner horn that does it. I love that Mame
Dugan. I’ve gone six days without food in order to coincide with her
sentiments. Only one bite did I have. That was when I knocked the
tattooed man down with a war club and got a sandwich he was gobbling.
The manager fined me all my salary; but salary wasn’t what I was
after. ‘Twas that girl. I’d give my life for her, but I’d endanger my
immortal soul for a beef stew. Hunger is a horrible thing, Jeff. Love
and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are
nothing but shadows of words when a man’s starving!’

“In such language Ed Collier discoursed to me, pathetic. I gathered
the diagnosis that his affections and his digestions had been
implicated in a scramble and the commissary had won out. I never
disliked Ed Collier. I searched my internal admonitions of suitable
etiquette to see if I could find a remark of a consoling nature, but
there was none convenient.

“‘I’d be glad, now,’ says Ed, ‘if you’ll let me go. I’ve been hard
hit, but I’ll hit the ration supply harder. I’m going to clean out
every restaurant in town. I’m going to wade waist deep in sirloins and
swim in ham and eggs. It’s an awful thing, Jeff Peters, for a man to
come to this pass–to give up his girl for something to eat–it’s
worse than that man Esau, that swapped his copyright for a partridge–
but then, hunger’s a fierce thing. You’ll excuse me, now, Jeff, for I
smell a pervasion of ham frying in the distance, and my legs are
crying out to stampede in that direction.’

“‘A hearty meal to you, Ed Collier,’ I says to him, ‘and no hard
feelings. For myself, I am projected to be an unseldom eater, and I
have condolence for your predicaments.’

“There was a sudden big whiff of frying ham smell on the breeze; and
the Champion Faster gives a snort and gallops off in the dark toward
fodder.

“I wish some of the cultured outfit that are always advertising the
extenuating circumstances of love and romance had been there to see.
There was Ed Collier, a fine man full of contrivances and flirtations,
abandoning the girl of his heart and ripping out into the contiguous
territory in the pursuit of sordid grub. ‘Twas a rebuke to the poets
and a slap at the best-paying element of fiction. An empty stomach is
a sure antidote to an overfull heart.

“I was naturally anxious to know how far Mame was infatuated with
Collier and his stratagems. I went inside the Unparalleled Exhibition,
and there she was. She looked surprised to see me, but unguilty.

“‘It’s an elegant evening outside,’ says I. ‘The coolness is quite
nice and gratifying, and the stars are lined out, first class, up
where they belong. Wouldn’t you shake these by-products of the animal
kingdom long enough to take a walk with a common human who never was
on a programme in his life?’

“Mame gave a sort of sly glance around, and I knew what that meant.

“‘Oh,’ says I, ‘I hate to tell you; but the curiosity that lives on
wind has flew the coop. He just crawled out under the tent. By this
time he has amalgamated himself with half the delicatessen truck in
town.’

“‘You mean Ed Collier?’ says Mame.

“‘I do,’ I answers; ‘and a pity it is that he has gone back to crime
again. I met him outside the tent, and he exposed his intentions of
devastating the food crop of the world. ‘Tis enormously sad when one’s
ideal descends from his pedestal to make a seventeen-year locust of
himself.’

“Mame looked me straight in the eye until she had corkscrewed my
reflections.

“‘Jeff,’ says she, ‘it isn’t quite like you to talk that way. I don’t
care to hear Ed Collier ridiculed. A man may do ridiculous things, but
they don’t look ridiculous to the girl he does ‘em for. That was one
man in a hundred. He stopped eating just to please me. I’d be hard-
hearted and ungrateful if I didn’t feel kindly toward him. Could you
do what he did?’

“‘I know,’ says I, seeing the point, ‘I’m condemned. I can’t help it.
The brand of the consumer is upon my brow. Mrs. Eve settled that
business for me when she made the dicker with the snake. I fell from
the fire into the frying-pan. I guess I’m the Champion Feaster of the
Universe.’ I spoke humble, and Mame mollified herself a little.

“‘Ed Collier and I are good friends,’ she said, ‘the same as me and
you. I gave him the same answer I did you–no marrying for me. I liked
to be with Ed and talk with him. There was something mighty pleasant
to me in the thought that here was a man who never used a knife and
fork, and all for my sake.’

“‘Wasn’t you in love with him?’ I asks, all injudicious. ‘Wasn’t there
a deal on for you to become Mrs. Curiosity?’

“All of us do it sometimes. All of us get jostled out of the line of
profitable talk now and then. Mame put on that little lemon glace
smile that runs between ice and sugar, and says, much too pleasant:
‘You’re short on credentials for asking that question, Mr. Peters.
Suppose you do a forty-nine day fast, just to give you ground to stand
on, and then maybe I’ll answer it.’

“So, even after Collier was kidnapped out of the way by the revolt of
his appetite, my own prospects with Mame didn’t seem to be improved.
And then business played out in Guthrie.

“I had stayed too long there. The Brazilians I had sold commenced to
show signs of wear, and the Kindler refused to light up right frequent
on wet mornings. There is always a time, in my business, when the star
of success says, ‘Move on to the next town.’ I was travelling by wagon
at that time so as not to miss any of the small towns; so I hitched up
a few days later and went down to tell Mame good-bye. I wasn’t
abandoning the game; I intended running over to Oklahoma City and work
it for a week or two. Then I was coming back to institute fresh
proceedings against Mame.

“What do I find at the Dugans’ but Mame all conspicuous in a blue
travelling dress, with her little trunk at the door. It seems that
sister Lottie Bell, who is a typewriter in Terre Haute, is going to be
married next Thursday, and Mame is off for a week’s visit to be an
accomplice at the ceremony. Mame is waiting for a freight wagon that
is going to take her to Oklahoma, but I condemns the freight wagon
with promptness and scorn, and offers to deliver the goods myself. Ma
Dugan sees no reason why not, as Mr. Freighter wants pay for the job;
so, thirty minutes later Mame and I pull out in my light spring wagon
with white canvas cover, and head due south.

“That morning was of a praiseworthy sort. The breeze was lively, and
smelled excellent of flowers and grass, and the little cottontail
rabbits entertained themselves with skylarking across the road. My two
Kentucky bays went for the horizon until it come sailing in so fast
you wanted to dodge it like a clothesline. Mame was full of talk and
rattled on like a kid about her old home and her school pranks and the
things she liked and the hateful ways of those Johnson girls just
across the street, ‘way up in Indiana. Not a word was said about Ed
Collier or victuals or such solemn subjects. About noon Mame looks and
finds that the lunch she had put up in a basket had been left behind.
I could have managed quite a collation, but Mame didn’t seem to be
grieving over nothing to eat, so I made no lamentations. It was a sore
subject with me, and I ruled provender in all its branches out of my
conversation.

“I am minded to touch light on explanations how I came to lose the
way. The road was dim and well grown with grass; and there was Mame by
my side confiscating my intellects and attention. The excuses are good
or they are not, as they may appear to you. But I lost it, and at dusk
that afternoon, when we should have been in Oklahoma City, we were
seesawing along the edge of nowhere in some undiscovered river bottom,
and the rain was falling in large, wet bunches. Down there in the
swamps we saw a little log house on a small knoll of high ground. The
bottom grass and the chaparral and the lonesome timber crowded all
around it. It seemed to be a melancholy little house, and you felt
sorry for it. ‘Twas that house for the night, the way I reasoned it. I
explained to Mame, and she leaves it to me to decide. She doesn’t
become galvanic and prosecuting, as most women would, but she says
it’s all right; she knows I didn’t mean to do it.

“We found the house was deserted. It had two empty rooms. There was a
little shed in the yard where beasts had once been kept. In a loft of
it was a lot of old hay. I put my horses in there and gave them some
of it, for which they looked at me sorrowful, expecting apologies. The
rest of the hay I carried into the house by armfuls, with a view to
accommodations. I also brought in the patent kindler and the
Brazilians, neither of which are guaranteed against the action of
water.

“Mame and I sat on the wagon seats on the floor, and I lit a lot of
the kindler on the hearth, for the night was chilly. If I was any
judge, that girl enjoyed it. It was a change for her. It gave her a
different point of view. She laughed and talked, and the kindler made
a dim light compared to her eyes. I had a pocketful of cigars, and as
far as I was concerned there had never been any fall of man. We were
at the same old stand in the Garden of Eden. Out there somewhere in
the rain and the dark was the river of Zion, and the angel with the
flaming sword had not yet put up the keep-off-the-grass sign. I opened
up a gross or two of the Brazilians and made Mame put them on–rings,
brooches, necklaces, eardrops, bracelets, girdles, and lockets. She
flashed and sparkled like a million-dollar princess until she had pink
spots in her cheeks and almost cried for a looking-glass.

“When it got late I made a fine bunk on the floor for Mame with the
hay and my lap robes and blankets out of the wagon, and persuaded her
to lie down. I sat in the other room burning tobacco and listening to
the pouring rain and meditating on the many vicissitudes that came to
a man during the seventy years or so immediately preceding his
funeral.

“I must have dozed a little while before morning, for my eyes were
shut, and when I opened them it was daylight, and there stood Mame
with her hair all done up neat and correct, and her eyes bright with
admiration of existence.

“‘Gee whiz, Jeff!’ she exclaims, ‘but I’m hungry. I could eat a–’

“I looked up and caught her eye. Her smile went back in and she gave
me a cold look of suspicion. Then I laughed, and laid down on the
floor to laugh easier. It seemed funny to me. By nature and geniality
I am a hearty laugher, and I went the limit. When I came to, Mame was
sitting with her back to me, all contaminated with dignity.

“‘Don’t be angry, Mame,’ I says, ‘for I couldn’t help it. It’s the
funny way you’ve done up your hair. If you could only see it!’

“‘You needn’t tell stories, sir,’ said Mame, cool and advised. ‘My
hair is all right. I know what you were laughing about. Why, Jeff,
look outside,’ she winds up, peeping through a chink between the logs.
I opened the little wooden window and looked out. The entire river
bottom was flooded, and the knob of land on which the house stood was
an island in the middle of a rushing stream of yellow water a hundred
yards wide. And it was still raining hard. All we could do was to stay
there till the doves brought in the olive branch.

“I am bound to admit that conversations and amusements languished
during that day. I was aware that Mame was getting a too prolonged
one-sided view of things again, but I had no way to change it.
Personally, I was wrapped up in the desire to eat. I had
hallucinations of hash and visions of ham, and I kept saying to myself
all the time, ‘What’ll you have to eat, Jeff?–what’ll you order now,
old man, when the waiter comes?’ I picks out to myself all sorts of
favourites from the bill of fare, and imagines them coming. I guess
it’s that way with all hungry men. They can’t get their cogitations
trained on anything but something to eat. It shows that the little
table with the broken-legged caster and the imitation Worcester sauce
and the napkin covering up the coffee stains is the paramount issue,
after all, instead of the question of immortality or peace between
nations.

“I sat there, musing along, arguing with myself quite heated as to how
I’d have my steak–with mushrooms, or a la creole. Mame was on the
other seat, pensive, her head leaning on her hand. ‘Let the potatoes
come home-fried,’ I states in my mind, ‘and brown the hash in the pan,
with nine poached eggs on the side.’ I felt, careful, in my own
pockets to see if I could find a peanut or a grain or two of popcorn.

“Night came on again with the river still rising and the rain still
falling. I looked at Mame and I noticed that desperate look on her
face that a girl always wears when she passes an ice-cream lair. I
knew that poor girl was hungry–maybe for the first time in her life.
There was that anxious look in her eye that a woman has only when she
has missed a meal or feels her skirt coming unfastened in the back.

“It was about eleven o’clock or so on the second night when we sat,
gloomy, in our shipwrecked cabin. I kept jerking my mind away from the
subject of food, but it kept flopping back again before I could fasten
it. I thought of everything good to eat I had ever heard of. I went
away back to my kidhood and remembered the hot biscuit sopped in
sorghum and bacon gravy with partiality and respect. Then I trailed
along up the years, pausing at green apples and salt, flapjacks and
maple, lye hominy, fried chicken Old Virginia style, corn on the cob,
spareribs and sweet potato pie, and wound up with Georgia Brunswick
stew, which is the top notch of good things to eat, because it
comprises ‘em all.

“They say a drowning man sees a panorama of his whole life pass before
him. Well, when a man’s starving he sees the ghost of every meal he
ever ate set out before him, and he invents new dishes that would make
the fortune of a chef. If somebody would collect the last words of men
who starved to death, they’d have to sift ‘em mighty fine to discover
the sentiment, but they’d compile into a cook book that would sell
into the millions.

“I guess I must have had my conscience pretty well inflicted with
culinary meditations, for, without intending to do so, I says, out
loud, to the imaginary waiter, ‘Cut it thick and have it rare, with
the French fried, and six, soft-scrambled, on toast.’

“Mame turned her head quick as a wing. Her eyes were sparkling and she
smiled sudden.

“‘Medium for me,’ she rattles out, ‘with the Juliennes, and three,
straight up. Draw one, and brown the wheats, double order to come. Oh,
Jeff, wouldn’t it be glorious! And then I’d like to have a half fry,
and a little chicken curried with rice, and a cup custard with ice
cream, and–’

“‘Go easy,’ I interrupts; ‘where’s the chicken liver pie, and the
kidney saute on toast, and the roast lamb, and–’

“‘Oh,’ cuts in Mame, all excited, ‘with mint sauce, and the turkey
salad, and stuffed olives, and raspberry tarts, and–’

“‘Keep it going,’ says I. ‘Hurry up with the fried squash, and the hot
corn pone with sweet milk, and don’t forget the apple dumpling with
hard sauce, and the cross-barred dew-berry pie–’

“Yes, for ten minutes we kept up that kind of restaurant repartee. We
ranges up and down and backward and forward over the main trunk lines
and the branches of the victual subject, and Mame leads the game, for
she is apprised in the ramifications of grub, and the dishes she
nominates aggravates my yearnings. It seems that there is a feeling
that Mame will line up friendly again with food. It seems that she
looks upon the obnoxious science of eating with less contempt than
before.

“The next morning we find that the flood has subsided. I geared up the
bays, and we splashed out through the mud, some precarious, until we
found the road again. We were only a few miles wrong, and in two hours
we were in Oklahoma City. The first thing we saw was a big restaurant
sign, and we piled into there in a hurry. Here I finds myself sitting
with Mame at table, with knives and forks and plates between us, and
she not scornful, but smiling with starvation and sweetness.

“‘Twas a new restaurant and well stocked. I designated a list of
quotations from the bill of fare that made the waiter look out toward
the wagon to see how many more might be coming.

“There we were, and there was the order being served. ‘Twas a banquet
for a dozen, but we felt like a dozen. I looked across the table at
Mame and smiled, for I had recollections. Mame was looking at the
table like a boy looks at his first stem-winder. Then she looked at
me, straight in the face, and two big tears came in her eyes. The
waiter was gone after more grub.

“‘Jeff,’ she says, soft like, ‘I’ve been a foolish girl. I’ve looked
at things from the wrong side. I never felt this way before. Men get
hungry every day like this, don’t they? They’re big and strong, and
they do the hard work of the world, and they don’t eat just to spite
silly waiter girls in restaurants, do they, Jeff? You said once–that
is, you asked me–you wanted me to–well, Jeff, if you still care–I’d
be glad and willing to have you always sitting across the table from
me. Now give me something to eat, quick, please.’

“So, as I’ve said, a woman needs to change her point of view now and
then. They get tired of the same old sights–the same old dinner
table, washtub, and sewing machine. Give ‘em a touch of the various–a
little travel and a little rest, a little tomfoolery along with the
tragedies of keeping house, a little petting after the blowing-up, a
little upsetting and a little jostling around–and everybody in the
game will have chips added to their stack by the play.”

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.”

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.

There was a painless stage of incubation that lasted twenty-five
years, and then it broke out on me, and people said I was It.

But they called it humor instead of measles.

The employees in the store bought a silver inkstand for the senior
partner on his fiftieth birthday. We crowded into his private office
to present it. I had been selected for spokesman, and I made a
little speech that I had been preparing for a week.

It made a hit. It was full of puns and epigrams and funny twists
that brought down the house–which was a very solid one in the
wholesale hardware line. Old Marlowe himself actually grinned, and
the employees took their cue and roared.

My reputation as a humorist dates from half-past nine o’clock on
that morning. For weeks afterward my fellow clerks fanned the flame
of my self-esteem. One by one they came to me, saying what an
awfully clever speech that was, old man, and carefully explained to
me the point of each one of my jokes.

Gradually I found that I was expected to keep it up. Others might
speak sanely on business matters and the day’s topics, but from me
something gamesome and airy was required.

I was expected to crack jokes about the crockery and lighten up the
granite ware with persiflage. I was second bookkeeper, and if I
failed to show up a balance sheet without something comic about the
footings or could find no cause for laughter in an invoice of plows,
the other clerks were disappointed. By degrees my fame spread, and
I became a local “character.” Our town was small enough to make this
possible. The daily newspaper quoted me. At social gatherings I was
indispensable.

I believe I did possess considerable wit and a facility for quick
and spontaneous repartee. This gift I cultivated and improved by
practice. And the nature of it was kindly and genial, not running to
sarcasm or offending others. People began to smile when they saw me
coming, and by the time we had met I generally had the word ready to
broaden the smile into a laugh.

I had married early. We had a charming boy of three and a girl of
five. Naturally, we lived in a vine-covered cottage, and were happy.
My salary as bookkeeper in the hardware concern kept at a distance
those ills attendant upon superfluous wealth.

At sundry times I had written out a few jokes and conceits that I
considered peculiarly happy, and had sent them to certain periodicals
that print such things. All of them had been instantly accepted.
Several of the editors had written to request further contributions.

One day I received a letter from the editor of a famous weekly
publication. He suggested that I submit to him a humorous composition
to fill a column of space; hinting that he would make it a regular
feature of each issue if the work proved satisfactory. I did so, and
at the end of two weeks he offered to make a contract with me for a
year at a figure that was considerably higher than the amount paid me
by the hardware firm.

I was filled with delight. My wife already crowned me in her mind
with the imperishable evergreens of literary success. We had lobster
croquettes and a bottle of blackberry wine for supper that night.
Here was the chance to liberate myself from drudgery. I talked over
the matter very seriously with Louisa. We agreed that I must resign
my place at the store and devote myself to humor.

I resigned. My fellow clerks gave me a farewell banquet. The speech
I made there coruscated. It was printed in full by the Gazette. The
next morning I awoke and looked at the clock.

“Late, by George!” I exclaimed, and grabbed for my clothes. Louisa
reminded me that I was no longer a slave to hardware and contractors’
supplies. I was now a professional humorist.

After breakfast she proudly led me to the little room off the kitchen.
Dear girl! There was my table and chair, writing pad, ink, and pipe
tray. And all the author’s trappings–the celery stand full of fresh
roses and honeysuckle, last year’s calendar on the wall, the
dictionary, and a little bag of chocolates to nibble between
inspirations. Dear girl!

I sat me to work. The wall paper is patterned with arabesques or
odalisks or–perhaps–it is trapezoids. Upon one of the figures I
fixed my eyes. I bethought me of humor.

A voice startled me–Louisa’s voice.

“If you aren’t too busy, dear,” it said, “come to dinner.”

I looked at my watch. Yes, five hours had been gathered in by the
grim scytheman. I went to dinner.

“You mustn’t work too hard at first,” said Louisa. “Goethe–or was it
Napoleon?–said five hours a day is enough for mental labor. Couldn’t
you take me and the children to the woods this afternoon?”

“I am a little tired,” I admitted. So we went to the woods.

But I soon got the swing of it. Within a month I was turning out
copy as regular as shipments of hardware.

And I had success. My column in the weekly made some stir, and I was
referred to in a gossipy way by the critics as something fresh in the
line of humorists. I augmented my income considerably by contributing
to other publications.

I picked up the tricks of the trade. I could take a funny idea and
make a two-line joke of it, earning a dollar. With false whiskers
on, it would serve up cold as a quatrain, doubling its producing
value. By turning the skirt and adding a ruffle of rhyme you would
hardly recognize it as vers de societe with neatly shod feet and a
fashion-plate illustration.

I began to save up money, and we had new carpets, and a parlor organ.
My townspeople began to look upon me as a citizen of some consequence
instead of the merry trifier I had been when I clerked in the
hardware store.

After five or six months the spontaniety seemed to depart from my
humor. Quips and droll sayings no longer fell carelessly from my
lips. I was sometimes hard run for material. I found myself
listening to catch available ideas from the conversation of my
friends. Sometimes I chewed my pencil and gazed at the wall paper
for hours trying to build up some gay little bubble of unstudied
fun.

And then I became a harpy, a Moloch, a Jonah, a vampire, to my
acquaintances. Anxious, haggard, greedy, I stood among them like a
veritable killjoy. Let a bright saying, a witty comparison, a piquant
phrase fall from their lips and I was after it like a hound springing
upon a bone. I dared not trust my memory; but, turning aside guiltily
and meanly, I would make a note of it in my ever-present memorandum
book or upon my cuff for my own future use.

My friends regarded me in sorrow and wonder. I was not the same man.
Where once I had furnished them entertainment and jollity, I now
preyed upon them. No jests from me ever bid for their smiles now.
They were too precious. I could not afford to dispense gratuitously
the means of my livelihood.

I was a lugubrious fox praising the singing of my friends, the crow’s,
that they might drop from their beaks the morsels of wit that I
coveted.

Nearly every one began to avoid me. I even forgot how to smile, not
even paying that much for the sayings I appropriated.

No persons, places, times, or subjects were exempt from my plundering
in search of material. Even in church my demoralized fancy went
hunting among the solemn aisles and pillars for spoil.

Did the minister give out the long-meter doxology, at once I began:
“Doxology –sockdology–sockdolager–meter–meet her.”

The sermon ran through my mental sieve, its precepts filtering
unheeded, could I but glean a suggestion of a pun or a bon mot.
The solemnest anthems of the choir were but an accompaniment to my
thoughts as I conceived new changes to ring upon the ancient
comicalities concerning the jealousies of soprano, tenor, and basso.

My own home became a hunting ground. My wife is a singularly feminine
creature, candid, sympathetic, and impulsive. Once her conversation
was my delight, and her ideas a source of unfailing pleasure. Now I
worked her. She was a gold mine of those amusing but lovable
inconsistencies that distinguish the female mind.

I began to market those pearls of unwisdom and humor that should have
enriched only the sacred precincts of home. With devilish cunning I
encouraged her to talk. Unsuspecting, she laid her heart bare. Upon
the cold, conspicuous, common, printed page I offered it to the
public gaze.

A literary Judas, I kissed her and betrayed her. For pieces of silver
I dressed her sweet confidences in the pantalettes and frills of folly
and made them dance in the market place.

Dear Louisa! Of nights I have bent over her cruel as a wolf above
a tender lamb, hearkening even to her soft words murmured in sleep,
hoping to catch an idea for my next day’s grind. There is worse to
come.

God help me! Next my fangs were buried deep in the neck of the
fugitive sayings of my little children.

Guy and Viola were two bright fountains of childish, quaint thoughts
and speeches. I found a ready sale for this kind of humor, and was
furnishing a regular department in a magazine with “Funny Fancies of
Childhood.” I began to stalk them as an Indian stalks the antelope.
I would hide behind sofas and doors, or crawl on my hands and knees
among the bushes in the yard to eavesdrop while they were at play.
I had all the qualities of a harpy except remorse.

Once, when I was barren of ideas, and my copy must leave in the next
mail, I covered myself in a pile of autumn leaves in the yard, where
I knew they intended to come to play. I cannot bring myself to
believe that Guy was aware of my hiding place, but even if he was,
I would be loath to blame him for his setting fire to the leaves,
causing the destruction of my new suit of clothes, and nearly
cremating a parent.

Soon my own children began to shun me as a pest. Often, when I was
creeping upon them like a melancholy ghoul, I would hear them say
to each other: “Here comes papa,” and they would gather their toys
and scurry away to some safer hiding place. Miserable wretch that
I was!

And yet I was doing well financially. Before the first year had
passed I had saved a thousand dollars, and we had lived in comfort.

But at what a cost! I am not quite clear as to what a pariah is,
but I was everything that it sounds like. I had no friends, no
amusements, no enjoyment of life. The happiness of my family had
been sacrificed. I was a bee, sucking sordid honey from life’s
fairest flowers, dreaded and shunned on account of my stingo.

One day a man spoke to me, with a pleasant and friendly smile. Not
in months had the thing happened. I was passing the undertaking
establishment of Peter Heffelbower. Peter stood in the door and
saluted me. I stopped, strangely wrung in my heart by his greeting.
He asked me inside.

The day was chill and rainy. We went into the back room, where a
fire burned, in a little stove. A customer came, and Peter left me
alone for a while. Presently I felt a new feeling stealing over me
–a sense of beautiful calm and content, I looked around the place.
There were rows of shining rosewood caskets, black palls, trestles,
hearse plumes, mourning streamers, and all the paraphernalia of the
solemn trade. Here was peace, order, silence, the abode of grave
and dignified reflections. Here, on the brink of life, was a little
niche pervaded by the spirit of eternal rest.

When I entered it, the follies of the world abandoned me at the door.
I felt no inclination to wrest a humorous idea from those sombre and
stately trappings. My mind seemed to stretch itself to grateful
repose upon a couch draped with gentle thoughts.

A quarter of an hour ago I was an abandoned humorist. Now I was a
philosopher, full of serenity and ease. I had found a refuge from
humor, from the hot chase of the shy quip, from the degrading pursuit
of the panting joke, from the restless reach after the nimble
repartee.

I had not known Heffelbower well. When he came back, I let him talk,
fearful that he might prove to be a jarring note in the sweet,
dirgelike harmony of his establishment.

But, no. He chimed truly. I gave a long sigh of happiness. Never
have I known a man’s talk to be as magnificently dull as Peter’s was.
Compared with it the Dead Sea is a geyser. Never a sparkle or a
glimmer of wit marred his words. Commonplaces as trite and as
plentiful as blackberries flowed from his lips no more stirring in
quality than a last week’s tape running from a ticker. Quaking a
little, I tried upon him one of my best pointed jokes. It fell back
ineffectual, with the point broken. I loved that man from then on.

Two or three evenings each week I would steal down to Heffelbower’s
and revel in his back room. That was my only joy. I began to rise
early and hurry through my work, that I might spend more time in my
haven. In no other place could I throw off my habit of extracting
humorous ideas from my surroundings. Peter’s talk left me no opening
had I besieged it ever so hard.

Under this influence I began to improve in spirits. It was the
recreation from one’s labor which every man needs. I surprised one
or two of my former friends by throwing them a smile and a cheery
word as I passed them on the streets. Several times I dumfounded
my family by relaxing long enough to make a jocose remark in their
presence.

I had so long been ridden by the incubus of humor that I seized my
hours of holiday with a schoolboy’s zest.

Mv work began to suffer. It was not the pain and burden to me that
it had been. I often whistled at my desk, and wrote with far more
fluency than before. I accomplished my tasks impatiently, as anxious
to be off to my helpful retreat as a drunkard is to get to his tavern.

My wife had some anxious hours in conjecturing where I spent my
afternoons. I thought it best not to tell her; women do not
understand these things. Poor girl!–she had one shock out of it.

One day I brought home a silver coffin handle for a paper weight and
a fine, fluffy hearse plume to dust my papers with.

I loved to see them on my desk, and think of the beloved back room
down at Heffelbower’s. But Louisa found them, and she shrieked with
horror. I had to console her with some lame excuse for having them,
but I saw in her eyes that the prejudice was not removed. I had to
remove the articles, though, at double-quick time.

One day Peter Heffelbower laid before me a temptation that swept me
off my feet. In his sensible, uninspired way he showed me his books,
and explained that his profits and his business were increasing
rapidly. He had thought of taking in a partner with some cash. He
would rather have me than any one he knew. When I left his place that
afternoon Peter had my check for the thousand dollars I had in the
bank, and I was a partner in his undertaking business.

I went home with feelings of delirious joy, mingled with a certain
amount of doubt. I was dreading to tell my wife about it. But I
walked on air. To give up the writing of humorous stuff, once more
to enjoy the apples of life, instead of squeezing them to a pulp for
a few drops of hard cider to make the pubic feel funny–what a boon
that would be!

At the supper table Louisa handed me some letters that had come during
my absence. Several of them contained rejected manuscript. Ever
since I first began going to Heffelbower’s my stuff had been coming
back with alarming frequency. Lately I had been dashing off my jokes
and articles with the greatest fluency. Previously I had labored like
a bricklayer, slowly and with agony.

Presently I opened a letter from the editor of the weekly with which I
had a regular contract. The checks for that weekly article were still
our main dependence. The letter ran thus:

DEAR SIR:
  As you are aware, our contract for the year expires with the present
month.  While regretting the necessity for so doing, we must say that
we do not care to renew same for the coming year.  We were quite
pleased with your style of humor, which seems to have delighted quite
a large proportion of our readers.  But for the past two months we
have noticed a decided falling off in its quality.  Your earlier work
showed a spontaneous, easy, natural flow of fun and wit.  Of late it
is labored, studied, and unconvincing, giving painful evidence of hard
toil and drudging mechanism.
  Again regretting that we do not consider your contributions
available any longer, we are, yours sincerely,
    THE EDITOR.

I handed this letter to my wife. After she had read it her face grew
extremely long, and there were tears in her eyes.

“The mean old thing!” she exclaimed indignantly. “I’m sure your
pieces are just as good as they ever were. And it doesn’t take you
half as long to write them as it did.” And then, I suppose, Louisa
thought of the checks that would cease coming. “Oh, John,” she
wailed, “what will you do now?”

For an answer I got up and began to do a polka step around the supper
table. I am sure Louisa thought the trouble had driven me mad; and
I think the children hoped it had, for they tore after me, yelling
with glee and emulating my steps. I was now something like their old
playmate as of yore.

“The theatre for us to-night!” I shouted; “nothing less. And a late,
wild, disreputable supper for all of us at the Palace Restaurant.
Lumpty-diddle-de-dee-de-dum!”

And then I explained my glee by declaring that I was now a partner in
a prosperous undertaking establishment, and that written jokes might
go hide their heads in sackcloth and ashes for all me.

With the editor’s letter in her hand to justify the deed I had done,
my wife could advance no objections save a few mild ones based on
the feminine inability to appreciate a good thing such as the little
back room of Peter Hef–no, of Heffelbower & Co’s. undertaking
establishment.

In conclusion, I will say that to-day you will find no man in our
town as well liked, as jovial, and full of merry sayings as I. My
jokes are again noised about and quoted; once more I take pleasure
in my wife’s confidential chatter without a mercenary thought, while
Guy and Viola play at my feet distributing gems of childish humor
without fear of the ghastly tormentor who used to dog their steps,
notebook in hand.

Our business has prospered finely. I keep the books and look after
the shop, while Peter attends to outside matters. He says that my
levity and high spirits would simply turn any funeral into a regular
Irish wake.

Every Saturday night the Clover Leaf Social Club gave a hop in the
hall of the Give and Take Athletic Association on the East Side. In
order to attend one of these dances you must be a member of the Give
and Take–or, if you belong to the division that starts off with the
right foot in waltzing, you must work in Rhinegold’s paper-box
factory. Still, any Clover Leaf was privileged to escort or be
escorted by an outsider to a single dance. But mostly each Give and
Take brought the paper-box girl that he affected; and few strangers
could boast of having shaken a foot at the regular hops.

Maggie Toole, on account of her dull eyes, broad mouth and left-
handed style of footwork in the 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?”