Zip! The line leaps out of the water. Another monster of the deep, whose conquest is necessary for the survival of the race of man, has been overcome. There he hangs, writhing on a hook! There he swings toward his triumphant foe, and the hand of the fisherman on the municipal breakwater, trembling with mysterious elation, closes about the wet, firm body of an outraged perch.

* * * * *

A make-believe hunt that now bears the name of sport. Yes, but not always. Here is one with a red, battered face and a curiously practical air about him. He is putting his fish in a basket and counting them. Two dozen perch.

"Want to sell them?"

He shakes his head.

"What are you going to do with them?"

He looks up and grins slowly. Then he points to his lips with his fingers and makes signs. This means he is dumb. He places his hand over his stomach and grins again. He is going to eat them. It is time to go home and do this, so he puts up his fishpole and packs his primitive paraphernalia—a tin can, a rusty spike, a bamboo pole.

Here is one, then, who, in the heart of the steel forest called civilization, still seeks out long forgotten ways of keeping life in his body. He hunts for fish.

The sun slides down the sky. The fishermen begin to pack up. They walk with their heads down and bent forward like number 7s. They raise their eyes occasionally to the piles of stone and steel that mark the city front. Back to their troubles and their cinder patch, but—and this is a curious fact—their eyes gleam with hope and curiosity.



THE SNOB

We happen to be on the same street car. A drizzle softens the windows. She sits with her pasty face and her dull, little eyes looking out at the dripping street. Her cotton suit curls at the lapels. The ends of her shoes curl like a pair of burlesque Oriental slippers. She holds her hands in her lap. Red, thick fingers that whisper tiredly, "We have worked," lie in her lap.

A slavey on her day off. There is no mistaking this. Nineteen or twenty years old, homely as a mud fence; ungraceful, doltish, she sits staring out of the window and her eyes blink at the rain. A peasant from southeastern Europe, a field hand who fell into the steerage of a transatlantic liner and fell out again. Now she has a day off and she goes riding into the country on a street car.

She will get off and slosh with her heavy feet through wet grass. She will walk down the muddied roads and drink in the odor of fields and trees once more. These are romantic conjectures. The car jolts along. It is going west. The rain continues. It runs diagonal dots across the window.

Everybody out. This is the end of the line. I have gone farther than necessary. But there is the slavey. We have been talking. At least I talked. She listened, her doltish face opening its mouth, her little eyes blinking. She has pimples, her skin is muddied. A distressful-looking creature. Yet there is something. This is her day off—a day free from the sweat of labor—and she goes on a street car into the country. So it would seem that under this blinking, frowzy exterior desire spreads its wings. She has memories, this blousy one. She has dreams.

The drizzle flies softly through the air. The city has disappeared. We walk down an incongruous stretch of pavement. It leads toward a forest or what looks like a forest. There are no houses. The sky asserts itself. I look up, but the shambling one whose clothes become active under water keeps her eyes to the pavement. This is disillusioning! "Here, slavey, is the sky," I think; "it becomes romantic for the moment because to you it is the symbol of lost dreams, or happy hours in fields. To me it is nothing but a sky. I have no interest in skies. But I am looking at it for you and enjoying it through your romantic eyes."

But her romantic eyes are oblivious. They consult the rain-washed pavement before her and nothing else. Very well, there are other and nicer skies in her heart that she contemplates. This is an inferior sky overhead. We walk on.

You see, I have been wrong. It is not green fields that lured the heavy feet of this slavey. She is not a peasant Cinderella. Grief, yes, hidden sorrow, has led her here. This is a cemetery.

It rains over the cemetery. There is silence. The white stones glisten. They stand like beggars asking alms of the winding paths. And this blousy one has come to be close to one of the white stones. Under one of them lies somebody whose image still lives in her heart.

She will kneel in the wet grass and her pasty little face will blink its dull eyes over a grave. Like a little clown in her curling cotton suit, her lumpy shoes, her idiotic hat, she will offer her tears to the pitiless silence of trees, wind, rain and white stones.

"Do you like them there?" She asks. She points to a cluster of fancy headstones.

"Do you?" I ask.

She smiles.

"Oh yes," she says. And she stops. She is admiring the tombstones. We walk on.

It is incredible. This blousy one, this dull-eyed one has come to the cemetery on her day off—to admire the tombstones. Ah, here is drama of a poignant kind. Let us pray God there is nothing pathologic here and that this is an idyl of despair, that the lumpish little slavey sits on the rain-washed bench dreaming of fine tombstones as a flapper might dream of fine dresses.

Yes, at last we are on the track. We talk. These are very pretty, she says. Life is dull. The days are drab. The place where she works is like an oven. There is nothing pretty to look at—even in mirrors there is nothing cool and pretty. Clothes grow lumpy when she puts them on. Boys giggle and call names when she goes out. And so, outcast, she comes here to the cemetery to dream of a day when something cool and pretty will belong to her. A headstone, perhaps a stately one with a figure above it. It will stand over her. She will be dead then and unable to enjoy it. But now she is alive. Now she can think of how pretty the stone will look and thus enjoy it in advance. This, after all, is the technique of all dreams.

We grow confidential. I have asked what sort she likes best, what sort it pleases her most to think about as standing over her grave when she dies. And she has pointed some out. It rains. The trees shake water and the wind hurries past the white stones.

"I will tell you something," she says. "Here, look at this." From one of her curled pockets she removes a piece of paper. It is crumpled. I open it and read:

"In Case of Accident please notify Misses Burbley,—Sheridan Road, and have body removed to Home of Parents who are residants of Corliss Wisconsin where they have resided for twenty Years and the diseased is a only Daughter named Clara. Age nineteen and educated in Corliss public Schools where she Graduated as a girl but came to Chicago in serch of employment and in case of accident funeral was held from Home of the Parents, many Frends attending and please Omit flours...."

"I got lot of them writ out," said Clara, blinking. "You wanna read more? Why I write them out? Oh, because, you can't tell, maybe you get run over and in accident and how they going to know who you are or what to do with the diseased if they don't find something?"

Her thick red hands grew excited. She produced further obituaries. From her pocketbook, from her bosom, from her pockets and one from under her hat. I read them. They were all alike, couched in vaguely bombastic terms. We sat in the rain and I thought:

"Alas, Clara is a bounder. A snob. She writes her own obituaries. Alive she can think of herself only as Clara, the slavey at whom the boys giggle and call names. But dead, she is the 'deseased'—the stately corpse commanding unprecedented attention. The prospect stirs a certain snobbishness in her. And she sits and writes her death notices out—using language she tries to remember from reading the funeral accounts of rich and powerful people."

Clara, her hat awry, her doltish body sagging in the rain—shuffled down the dirt road once more. Her outing is over. Cinderella returns to the ashes of life.



THE WAY HOME

He shuffles around in front of the Clinton Street employment agency. The signs say: "Pick men wanted, section hands wanted, farm laborers wanted."

A Mexican stands woodenly against the window front. His eyes are open but asleep. He has the air of one come from a far country who lives upon memories.

There are others—roughly dressed exiles. Their eyes occasionally study the signs, deciphering with difficulty the crudely chalked words on the bulletin boards. Slav, Swede, Pole, Italian, Greek—they read in a language foreign to them that men are wanted on the farms in the Dakotas, in the lumber camps, on the roadbeds in Montana. Hard-handed men with dull, seamed faces and glittering eyes—the spike-haired proletaire from a dozen lands looking for jobs.

But this one who shuffles about in a tattered mackinaw, huge baggy trousers frayed at the feet, this one whose giant's body swings loosely back and forth under the signs, is a more curious exile. His Mexican brother leaning woodenly against the window has a slow dream in his eyes. Life is simple to his thought. It was hard for him in Mexico. And adventure and avarice sent him northward in quest of easier ways and more numerous comforts. Now he hunts a job on a chilly spring morning. When the proper job is chalked up on the bulletin board he will go in and ask for it. He stands and waits and thinks how happy he was in the country he abandoned and what a fool he was to leave the white dust of its roads, its hills and blazing suns. And some day, he thinks, he will go back, although there is nothing to go back for. Yet it is pleasant to stand and dream of a place one has known and whither one may return.

But this one who shuffles, this giant in a tattered mackinaw who slouches along under the bulletin signs asking for section hands and laborers, there is no dream of remembered places in his eyes. Dull, blue eyes that peer bewilderedly out of a powerful and empty face. The forehead is puckered as if in thought. The heavy jaws protrude with a hint of ferocity in their set. There is a reddish cast to his hair and face and the backs of his great hands, hanging limply almost to his knees, are covered with red hair.

The nose of this shuffling one is larger than the noses in the city streets. His fingers are larger, his neck is larger. There is a curious earthy look to this shuffling one seldom to be seen about men in streets. He is a huge creature with great thighs and Laocooen sinews and he towers a head above his brothers in front of the employment office. He is of a different mold from the men in the street. Strength ripples under his tattered mackinaw and his stiff looking hands could break the heads of two men against each other like eggshells while they rained puny blows on his dull face.

And yet of all the men moving about on the pavement in front of the Clinton Street bulletin boards it is this shuffling one who is the most impotent seeming. His figure is the most helpless. It slouches as under a final defeat. His eyes are the dullest.

He stops at the corner and stands waiting, his head lowered, his shoulders hunched in and he looks like a man weighed down by a harness.

* * * * *

A curious exile from whose blood has vanished all memory of the country to which he belongs. A faraway land, ages beyond the sun-warmed roads of which his Mexican brother dreams as he stands under the bulletin boards. A land which the ingenuity of the world has left forever behind. This is a land that once reached over all the seas.

For it was like this that men once looked in an age before the myths of the Persians and Hindus began to fertilize the animal soul of the race. In the forests north of the earliest cities of Greece, along the wild coasts tapering from the Tatar lands to the peninsula of the Basques, men like this shuffling one once ranged alone and in tribes. Huge, powerful men whose foreheads sloped back and whose jaws sloped forward and whose stiff hands reached an inch nearer their knees than today.

This giant in the tattered mackinaw is an exile from this land and there is no dream of it left in his blood. The body of his fathers has returned to him. Their long, loose arms, their thick muscles and heavy pounding veins are his, but their voices are buried too deep to rise again in him. The mutterings of warrior councils, the shouts of terrible hunts are lost somewhere in him and he shuffles along, his sloping forehead in a pucker of thought as if he were trying to remember. But no memories come. Instead a bewilderment. The swarming streets bewilder him. The towering buildings, the noises of traffic and people dull his eyes and bring his shoulders together like the shoulders of some helpless captive.

* * * * *

He returns to the employment office and raises his eyes to the bulletin boards. He reads slowly, his large lips moving as they form words. In another day or another week he will be riding somewhere, his dull eyes gazing out of the train window. They will call him Ole or Pat or Jim in some camp in the Dakotas or along some roadbed in Montana. He will stand with a puny pick handle in his huge hands and his arms will rise and fall mechanically as he hews away along a deserted track. And his forehead will still be puckered in a frown of bewilderment. The thing held in his fists will seem like a strange toy.

"Farm laborers in Kansas," says the bulletin board as the clerk with his piece of chalk re-enters the office. The Mexican slowly removes himself from the window and the contemplation of memories. Kansas lies to the south and to the south is the way home. He goes in and talks to the man behind the long desk.

An hour later the clerk and his piece of chalk emerge. The exiles are still mooching around on the pavement and the shuffling one stands on the curb staring dully at the street under him.

"Section hands, Alberta, Canada, transportation," says the new bulletin. There is no stir among the exiles. This is to the north. It is still cold in the north. But the shuffling one has turned. His eyes again trace the crudely chalked letters of the bulletin board. His lips move as he tells himself what is written.

And then as if unconsciously he moves toward the door. Alberta is to the north and the voices that lie buried deep under the giant's mackinaw whisper darkly that to the north—to the north is the way home.



THE PIG

"Sofie Popapovitch versus Anton Popapovitch," cries the clerk. A number of broken-hearted matrons awaiting their turn before the bar of justice in the Domestic Relations Court find time to giggle at the name Popapovitch.

"Silence," cries the clerk. Very well, silence. Anton steps out. What's the matter with Anton? An indignant face, its chin raised, its eyes marching defiantly to the bar of justice. Sofie too, but weeping. And a lawyer, Sofie's lawyer.

Well, what's up? Why should the Popapovitches take up valuable time. Think of the taxpayers supporting this court and two Popapovitches marching up to have an argument on the taxpayers' money. Well, that's civilization.

Ah, ah! It appears that Anton, the rogue, went to a grand ball and raffle given by his lodge. What's wrong with that? Why must Sofie weep over that? Women are incredible. He went to the grand ball with his wife, as a man should. A very fine citizen, Anton. He belongs to a lodge that gives grand balls and he takes his wife.

Go on, says the judge, what happened? What's the complaint? Time is precious. Let's have it in a nutshell.

This is a good idea. People spend a frightful lot of unnecessary time weeping and mumbling in the courts. Mrs. Popapovitch will please stop weeping and get down to brass tacks. Very well, the complaint is, your honor, that Mr. Popapovitch got drunk at the grand ball. But that wasn't the end of it. There's some more. A paragraph of tears and then, your honor, listen to this: Mr. Popapovitch not only got drunk but he took a chance on the raffle which cost one dollar and he won.

But what did he win! Oh, oh! He won a pig. A live pig. That was the prize. A small, live pig with a ribbon round its neck. And, says Mrs. Popapovitch (there's humor in a long foreign-sounding name because it conjures up visions of bewildered, flat-faced people and bewildered, flat-faced people are always humorous), and, says she, they had been married ten years. Happily married. She washed, scrubbed, tended house. There were no children. Well, what of that? Lots of people had no children.

Anyway, Anton worked, brought home his pay envelope O.K. And then he wins this pig. And what does he do? He takes it home. He won't leave it anywhere.

"What!" he says, "I leave this pig anywhere? Are you crazy? It's my pig. I win him. I take him home with me."

And then? Well, it's midnight, your honor. And Anton carries the pig upstairs into the flat. But there's no place to put him. Where can one put a pig in a flat, your honor? No place. The pig don't like to stand on carpets. And what pig likes to sleep on hard wood floors? A pig's a pig. And what's good for a pig? Aha! a pig pen.

So, your honor, Anton puts him in the bathtub. And he starts down stairs with a basket and all night long he keeps bringing up basketfuls of dirt dug up from the alley. Dirt, cinders, more dirt. And he puts it in the bathtub. And what does the pig do? He squeals, grunts and wants to go home. He fights to get out of the bathtub. There's such a noise nobody can sleep. But Anton says, "Nice little pig. I fix you up fine. Nice little pig."

And so he fills the bathtub up with dirt. Then he turns on the water. And what does he say? He says, "Now, little pig, we have fine mud for you. Nice fine mud." Yes, your honor, a whole bathtub full of mud. And when the pig sees this he gets happy and lies down and goes to sleep. And Anton sits in the bathroom and looks at the pig all night and says, "See. He's asleep. It's like home for him."

But the next day Anton must go to work. All right, he'll go to work. But first, understand everybody, he don't want this pig touched. The pig stays in the bathtub and he must be there when he comes home.

All right. The pig stays in the bathtub, your honor. Anton wants it. Tomorrow the pig will be killed and that'll be an end for the pig.

Anton comes home and he goes in the bathroom and he sits and looks at the pig and complains the mud is dried up and why don't somebody take care of his pig. His damn pig. He brings up more dirt and makes more mud. And the pig tries to climb out and throws mud all over the bathroom.

That's one day. And then there's another day. And finally a third day. Will Anton let anybody kill his pig? Aha! He'll break somebody's neck if he does. But, your honor, Mrs. Popapovitch killed the pig. A terrible thing, isn't it, to kill a pig that keeps squealing in the bathtub and splashing mud all day?

But what does Anton do when he comes home and finds his pig killed? My God! He hits her, your honor. He hits her on the head. His own wife whom he loves and lives with for ten years. He throws her down and hollers, "You killed my little pig! You good for nothing. I'll show you."

What a disgrace for the neighbors! Lucky there are no children, your honor. Married ten years but no children. And it's lucky now. Because the disgrace would have been worse. The neighbors come. They pull him away from his wife. Her eye is black and blue. Her nose is bleeding. That's all, your honor.

A very bad case for Anton Popapovitch. A decidedly bad case. Step forward, Anton Popapovitch, and explain it, if you can. Did you beat her up? Did you do this thing? And are you ashamed and willing to apologize and kiss and make up?

Anton, step forward and tell his honor. But be careful. Mrs. Popapovitch has a lawyer and it will go bad with you if you don't talk carefully.

All right. Here's Anton. He nods and keeps on nodding. What is this? What's he nodding about? Did this happen as your wife says, Anton? Anton blows out his cheeks and rubs his workingman's hand over his mouth. To think that you should beat your wife who has always been good to you, Anton. Who has cooked and been true to you! And there are no children to worry you. Not one. And you beat her. Bah, is that a man? Don't you love your wife? Yes. All right, then why did you do it?

Anton looks up surprised. "Because," says Anton, still surprised, "like she say. She kill my pig. You hear yourself, your honor. She say she kill him. And I put him in the bathtub and give him mud. And she kill him."

But is that a reason to beat your wife and nearly kill her? It is, says Anton. Well, then, why? Tell the judge, why you were so fond of this pig, Anton.

Ah, yes, Anton Popapovitch, tell the judge why you loved this little pig so much and made a home for him with mud in the bathtub. Why you dreamed of him as you stood working in the factory? Why you ran home to him and fed him and sat and looked at him and whispered "Nice little pig?" Why?

God knows. But Anton Popapovitch can't explain it. It must remain one of the mysteries of our city, your honor. Call the next case. Put Anton Popapovitch on parole. Perhaps it was because..., well, the matter is ended. Anton Popapovitch sighs and looks with accusing eyes at his wife Sofie, with accusing eyes that hint at evidence unheard.



THE LITTLE FOP

This little caricature of a fop, loitering in the hotel lobby, enthralled by his own fastidiousness, gazing furtively at the glisten of his newly manicured nails and shuddering with awe at the memory of the puckered white silk lining inside his Prince of Wales derby—I've watched him for more than a month now. Here he comes, his pointed button shoes, his razor-edged trousers, his natty tan overcoat with its high waist band and its amazing lapels that stick up over his shoulders like the ears of a jackass, here he comes embroidered and scented and looking like a cross between a soft-shoe dancer and a somnambulist. And here he takes his position, holding his gloves in his hand, his Prince of Wales derby jammed down on his patent-leather hair.

Observe him. This is a pose. He is living up to a fashion illustration in one of the magazines. Or perhaps he is duplicating an attitude of some one studied in a Michigan Avenue club entrance. His right arm is crooked as if he were about to place his hand over his heart and bow. His left arm hangs with a slight curve at his side. His feet should be together, but they shift nervously. His head is turned to the left and slightly raised—like a movie actor posing for a cigarette advertisement.

And there he stands, a dead ringer for one of the waxen dummies to be seen in a Halsted Street Men's Snappy Furnishings Store.

* * * * *

I've watched him for a month, off and on. And his face still says nothing. His eyes are curiously emotionless. They appear suddenly in his face. He is undersized. His nose, despite the recent massage and powder, has a slight oleaginous gleam to it. The cheek bones are a bit high, the mouth a trifle wide and the chin slightly bulbous. As he blinks about him with his small, almost Mongolian eyes he looks like some honest little immigrant from Bohemia or Poland whom a malignant sorcerer has changed into a caricature fashion plate. This is, indeed, the legend of Cinderella and the fairy godmother with an ending of pathos.

Yet, though his face says nothing, there is a provoking air to this little fop. His studied inanimation, his crudely self-conscious pose, his dull, little, peasant eyes staring at the faces that drift by in the lobby—these ask for translation. Why is he here? What does he want? Why does he come every evening and stand and watch the little hotel parade? Ah, one never sees him in the dining room or on the dance floor. One never meets him between the acts in the theater lobby. And one never sees him talking to anybody. He is always alone. People pass him with a curious glance and think to themselves, "Ah, a young man about town! What a shame to dissipate like that!" They sometimes notice the masterly way in which he sizes up a fur-coated "chicken" stalking thin-leggedly through the lobby and think to themselves: "The scoundrel! He's the kind of creature that makes a big city dangerous. A carefully combed and scented vulture waiting to swoop down from the side lines."

Evening after evening between 6 o'clock and midnight he drifts in and out of the lobby, up and down Randolph Street and takes up his position at various points of vantage where crowds pass, where women pass. I've watched him. No one ever talks to him. There are no salutations. He is unknown and worse. For the women, the rouged and ornamental ones, know him a bit too well. They know the carefully counted nickels in his trousers pocket, the transfers he is saving for the three-cent rebate that may come some day, the various newspaper coupons through which he hopes to make a killing.

All this they know and through a sixth sense, a curious instinct of sex divination, they know the necktie counter or information desk behind which he works during the day, the stuffy bedroom to which he will go home to sleep, the vacuity of his mind and gaudy emptiness of his spirit. They know all this and pass him up with never a smile. Yes, even the manicure girls in the barber shop give him the out-and-out sneer and the hat-check girls and even the floor girls—the chambermaids—all of whom he has tried to date up—they all respond with an identical raspberry to his invitations.

But he asks for translation—this determined little caricature of the hotel lobby. A little peasant masquerading as a dazzled moth around the bright lights. Not entirely. There is something else. There is something of a great dream behind the ridiculous pathos of this over-dressed little fool. There is something in him that desires expression, that will never achieve expression, and that will always leave him just such an absurd little clown of a fop.

* * * * *

When the manicure girls read this they will snort. Because they know him too well. "Of all the half-witted dumbbells I ever saw in my life," they will say, "he wins the cement earmuffs. Nobody home, honest to Gawd, he's nothin' but a nasty little fourflusher. We know him and his kind."

Fortunately I don't know him as well as the manicure girls do, so there is room for this speculation as I watch him in the evening now and then. I see him standing under the blaze of lobby lights, in the thick of passing fur coats and dinner jackets, in the midst of laughter, escorts, intrigues, actors, famous names.

He stands perfectly still, with his right arm crooked as if he were going to place his hand over his heart and bow, with his left arm slightly curved at his side. Grace. This is a pose denoting grace. He got it somewhere from an illustration. And he holds it. Here is life. The real stuff. The real thing. Lights and laughter. Glories, coiffures, swell dames, great actors, guys loaded with coin. His little Mongolian eyes blink through his amusing aplomb. Here are gilded pillars and marbled walls, great rugs and marvelous furniture. Here music is playing somewhere and people are eating off gold-edged dishes.

* * * * *

And now you will smile at me, not him. Because watching him of evenings, on and off, a curious notion takes hold of my thoughts. I have noticed the race oddities of his face, the Mongolian eyes, the Slavic cheek bones, the Italian hair. A mixed breed, this little fop. Mixed through a dozen centuries. Fathers and mothers that came from a hundred parts of the earth. But down the centuries they had one thing in common. Servitude. The Carlovingian courts, the courts of the De Medici, the Valois, and long before that, the great houses that lay around the Roman hills. Dragged from their villages, east, west, north and south, they flitted in the trappings of servitude through the vast halls of tyrants, barons, Caesars, sybarites, debauchees. They were the torchbearers, the caitiffs, the varlets, the bathkeepers, the inanimate figures whose faces watched from the shadows the great orgies of Tiberius, the bacchanals of satraps, kings, captains and squires.

And here their little great-great-grandson stands as they stood, the ghost of their servitude in his sluggish blood. He is content with his role of watcher as his people were content. These slightly grotesque trappings of his are a disguise. He wishes to disguise the fact that he is of the torchbearers, the varlets, the bathkeepers who produced him. So he imitates servilely what he fancies to be the distinguishing marks of his betters—their clothes, their manners, their aplomb. This accomplished, he is content to yield himself to the mysterious impulses and dreams that move silently through him.

And so he takes his position beside his people—the mixed breeds dragged from their scattered villages—so he stands as they stood through the centuries, their faces watching from the shadows the gorgeousness and tumult of the great aristocrats.



MOTTKA

Since most of the great minds that have weighed the subject have arrived at the opinion that between poverty and crime there is an inevitable affinity, the suspicion with which the eye of Policeman Billings rested upon Mottka, the vender of roasted chestnuts, reflected creditably upon that good officer's grasp of the higher philosophies.

Policeman Billings, sworn to uphold the law and assist in the protection of property, viewed the complications and mysteries of the social system with a simple and penetrating logic. The rich are not dangerous, reasoned Policeman Billings, because they have what they want. But the poor who have not what they want are, despite paradox and precedent, always to be watched closely. A raggedly dressed man walking in a dark, lonely street may be honesty itself. Yet rags, even when worn for virtue's sake, are a dubious assurance of virtue. They are always ominous to one sworn to protect property and uphold the law.

There is a maxim by Chateaubriand, or perhaps it was Stendhal—maxims have a way of leaving home—which claims that the equilibrium of society rests upon the acquiescence of its oppressed and unfortunate.

* * * * *

In passing the battered chestnut roaster of the unfortunate Mottka, Policeman Billings was aware in his own way of the foregoing elements of social philosophy. Mottka had chosen for his little shop an old soapbox which a wastrel providence had deposited in the alley on Twenty-second Street, a few feet west of State Street. Here Mottka sat, nursing the fire of his chestnut roaster with odd bits of refuse which seldom reached the dignity of coal or even wood.

He was an old man and the world had used him poorly. He was, in fact, one of those upon whom the equilibrium of the social system rests. He was unfortunate, oppressed and acquiescent. Arriving early in the forenoon he set up his shop, lighted his fire and took his place on the soapbox. When the lights began to wink out along this highway of evil ghosts Mottka was still to be seen hunched over his chestnut roaster and waiting.

Policeman Billings strolling over his beat was wont to observe Mottka. There were many things demanding the philosophical attention of Policeman Billings. Not so long ago the neighborhood which he policed had been renowned to the four corners of the earth as the rendezvous of more temptations than even St. Anthony enumerated in his interesting brochure on the subject. And Policeman Billings felt the presence of much of this evil lingering in the brick walls, broken windows and sagging pavements of the district.

It was after a number of days on the beat that Policeman Billings began to take Mottka seriously. There was something curious about the chestnut vender, and the eye of the good officer grew narrow with suspicion. "This man," reasoned Policeman Billings, "makes pretense of being a vender of roasted chestnuts. He sits all day in the alley between two saloons. I have never noticed him sell any chestnuts. And come to think of it, I have never seen more than a half-dozen chestnuts on his roasting pan. I begin to suspect that this old man is a fraud and that his roasting chestnuts is a blind. He is very likely a lookout for some bootlegger gang or criminal mob. And I will keep an eye on him."

* * * * *

Mottka remained unaware of Policeman Billing's attention. He continued to sit hunched over his roaster, nursing the little fire under it as best he could—and waiting. But finally Policeman Billings called himself to his attention in no uncertain way.

"What's your name?" asked the good officer, stopping before the chestnut vender.

"Mottka," answered Mottka.

"And what are you doing here?" asked Policeman Billings, frowning.

"I roast chestnuts and sell them," said Mottka.

"Hm!" said Policeman Billings, "you do, eh? Well, we'll see about that. Come along."

Mottka rose without question. One does not ask questions of an officer of the law. Mottka stood up and put the fire out and put the handful of chestnuts in his pocket and picked up his roaster and followed the officer. A half-hour later Mottka stood before the sergeant in the Twenty-second street station.

"What's the trouble?" asked the sergeant.

And Policeman Billings explained.

"He claims to be selling chestnuts and roasting them. But I never see him sell any, much less do I see him roasting any. He's got about a dozen chestnuts altogether and I think he may bear looking into."

"What about it, Mottka?" asked the sergeant.

Mottka shrugged his shoulders, shook his head and smiled deprecatingly.

"Nothing," he said, "I got a chestnut roaster I got from a friend on the West Side. And I try to make business. I got a license."

"But the officer says you never roast any chestnuts and he thinks you're a fake."

"Yes, yes," smiled Mottka; "I don't have so many chestnuts. I can't afford only a little bit at a time. Some time I buy a basket of chestnuts."

"Where do you live, Mottka?"

"Oh, on the West Side. On the West Side."

"And what did you do before you roasted chestnuts?"

"Me? Oh, I was in a business. Yes, in a business. And it failed. So I got the chestnut roaster. I got a license."

"It seems to me I've seen you before, Mottka."

"Yes, yes. A policeman bring me here before when I was on Wabash Avenue with my chestnuts."

"What did he bring you in for?"

"Oh, because he thinks I am a crook, because I don't have enough chestnuts to sell. He says I am a lookout for crooks and he brings me in."

Mottka laughed softly and shrugged his shoulders.

"I am no crook. Only I am too poor to buy more chestnuts."

Policeman Billings frowned, but not at Mottka.

"Here," said the good officer, and he handed Mottka a dollar. Three other upholders of the law were present and they too handed Mottka money.

"Go and buy yourself some chestnuts, Mottka," said the sergeant, "so the officers won't be runnin' you in on suspicion of bein' a criminal."

Now Mottka's chestnut roaster in the alley off State Street is full of chestnuts. A bright fire burns under the pan and Mottka sits watching the chestnuts brown and peel as they roast. And if you were to ask him about things he would say:

"Tell something? What is there to tell? Nothing."



"FA'N TA MIG!"

Avast and belay there! Take in the topgallants, wind up the mizzenmast and reef the cleets! This is Tobias Wooden-Leg plowing his way through a high sea in Grand Avenue.

Aye, what a night, what a night! The devil astride the jib boom, his tail lashing in the wind. "Pokker!" says Tobias, "fa'n ta mig. Hold tight and here we go!"

The boys in the Elite poolroom stand grinning in the doorway. Old Norske Tobias is on a tear again, his red face shining with the memory of Stavanger storms, his beard bristling like a north cat's back. An Odin in caricature.

They watch him pass. Drunker than a fiddler's wench. Drunker than a bootlegger's pal. Drunk as the devil himself and roaring at the top of his voice: "Belay, there! Hold tight and here we go!" Poor Tobias Wooden-Leg, the years keep plucking out his hairs and twisting his fingers into talons. Seventy years have squeezed him. And they have brought him piety and wisdom. They have taught him virtue and holiness.

But the wind suddenly rises and comes blowing out of Stavanger again. The great sea suddenly lifts under his one good leg. And Tobias with his Bibles and his prayer books struggles in the dark of his Grand Avenue bedroom. The devil comes and sits on his window sill, a devil with long locks and bronze wings beside his ears and a three-pronged pitchfork in his hand.

"Ho, ho!" cries this one on the window sill. "What are you doing here, Tobias? With the north wind blowing and the gray seas standing on their heads? Grown old, Tobias, eh? Sitting in a corner and mumbling over litanies."

And it has always been like that since he came to Grand Avenue ten years ago. It has always turned out that Tobias takes off his white shirt and puts on his sailor's black sweater and fastens on his old wooden leg and follows the one on the window sill.

* * * * *

Avast and belay! The night is still young and a sailor man's abroad. The sergeant going off duty at the Chicago Avenue station passes and winks and calls: "Hello, Tobias. Pretty rough tonight."

"Fa'n ta mig!" roars Tobias. "Hold tight." And he steers for Clark Street. And now the one on the window sill is gone and the storm grows quiet. And poor Tobias Wooden-Leg, the venerable and pious, who has won the grace of God through a terrific fight, finds himself again lost and strayed.

Of what good were the prayers and the night after night readings in the old sea captain's Bible stolen forty years ago? Of what good the promises and tears of repentance, when this thing that seemed to rise out of forgotten seas could come and jump up on his window sill and bewitch him as if he were a heedless boy? When it could sit laughing at him until in its laugh he heard the sounds of old winds roaring and old seas standing on their heads, and he put on his black sweater—the moth-eaten badge of his sinfulness—and he put on his wooden leg and lifted out the handful of money from under the corner of the carpet?

What good were the prayers if they couldn't keep him pious? Yes, that was it. And here the habitues along North Clark Street grin. For Tobias Wooden-Leg is coming down the pavement, his head hanging low, his beard no longer bristling and his soul on a hunt for a new God. A strong God. A powerful and commanding God, stronger than the long-locked, bronze-winged one of the window sill.

They grin because this is an old story. Tobias is an old character. Once every two or three months for ten years Tobias has come like this with his head lowered searching for a new and powerful God that would keep him pious and that would kill the devil that seemed never to die inside his old Norske soul.

So he had taken them all—a jumble of gods, a patchwork of religions. Every soapbox apostle in the district had at one time converted him. Holy Roller, Methodist, Jumper, Yogi, Swami, Zionite—he had bowed his head before their and a dozen other varied gods. And the missions in the district had come to know him as "the convert." He had been faithful to each of the creeds as long as he remained sober and as long as he sat in his room of nights reading in his Bible.

But come a storm out of Stavanger, come a whistling under the eaves and a thumping of wind on the window pane and Tobias was off again. "He is not a good God!" Tobias would cry in his new "repentance." "His religion is too weak. The devil is stronger than Him. I want a stronger religion. Pagh, I want somebody big enough to kill this fanden inside me."

The crowd around the soapbox evangelist is rather slight. The night is cold. The wind bites and the street has a dismal air. The evangelist stands around the corner from the old book store in whose windows thousands of musty volumes are piled like the bones of hermits. The man who owns this curious book store is a sun-worshipper. And the evangelist on the soapbox is a friend of his.

The slight crowd listens. Peace comes from the sun. The sun is the source of light and of health. It is the eye of God. Terrible by day and watching by night. It is the fire of life. The slight crowd grins and the evangelist, his mind bubbling with a cabalistic jargon remembered out of musty books, tries to explain something that seems vivid in his heart but vague to his tongue.

They will drop away soon because the night is cold and the evangelist a bit too nutty for serious attention. But here comes Tobias Wooden-Leg and some of the listeners grin and nudge one another. Tobias, with his voice hoarse and his blue eyes shining with wrath—wrath at himself and wrath at the God who had abandoned him, unable to cope with the one on the window sill.

Tobias listens. Terrible by day and ever watchful by night. The King of Kings, the Great Majesty and secret symbol of the absolute. Tobias drinks in the jargon of the soapbox man and then shouts: "I'll join, I'll join! I want a strong God!"

* * * * *

So now Tobias Wooden-Leg is a sun-worshipper. The boys in the Elite poolroom will tell you all about it. How he walks the street at dawn with his head raised and bows every seven steps. And how in the evening he is to be seen standing at his window bowing to the sun going down. And how he has been around saying: "Well, I have found the big God at last. No more monkey business for me. Listen to what it says in the book about him." And how he will quote from the sea captain's Bible stolen forty years ago.

But the boys also say: "Just wait."

And they wink, meaning that another storm will blow up out of Stavanger in Norway and old Tobias will come plowing down the street again howling that fa'n ta mig the devil has him and that old Thor leaped on his window sill and tossed the all-powerful sun out of the sky with his hammer.



FANTASTIC LOLLYPOPS

They will never start. No, they will never start. In another two minutes Mr. Prokofieff will go mad. They should have started at eleven. It is now ten minutes after eleven. And they have not yet started. Ah, Mr. Prokofieff has gone mad.

But Mr. Prokofieff is a modernist; so nobody pays much attention. Musicians are all mad. And a modernist musician, du lieber Gott! A Russian modernist musician!

The medieval face of Mr. Boris Anisfeld pops over the rows of empty seats. It is very likely that Mr. Anisfeld will also go mad. For Mr. Anisfeld is, in a way, a collaborator of Mr. Prokofieff. It is the full dress rehearsal of "The Love for Three Oranges." Mr. Prokofieff wrote the words and music. Mr. Anisfeld painted the scenery.

"Mees Garden weel be hear in a meenute," the medieval face of Boris whispers into the Muscovite ears of Serge.

* * * * *

Eleven-fifteen, and Miss Garden has arrived. She is armed, having brought along her heaviest shillalah. Mr. Prokofieff is on his feet. He takes off his coat. The medieval face of Mr. Anisfeld vanishes. Tap, tap, on the conductor's stand. Lights out. A fanfare from the orchestra's right.

Last rehearsal for the world premier of a modernist opera! One winter morning years ago the music critics of Paris sat and laughed themselves green in the face over the incomprehensible banalities of an impossible modernist opera called "Tannhaeuser." And who will say that critics have lost their sense of humor. There will unquestionably be laughter before this morning is over.

* * * * *

Music like this has never come from the orchestra pit of the Auditorium. Strange combinations of sounds that seem to come from street pianos, New Year's eve horns, harmonicas and old-fashioned musical beer steins that play when you lift them up. Mr. Prokofieff waves his shirt-sleeved arms and the sounds increase.

There is nothing difficult about this music—that is, unless you are unfortunate enough to be a music critic. But to the untutored ear there is a charming capriciousness about the sounds from the orchestra. Cadenzas pirouette in the treble. Largos toboggan in the bass. It sounds like the picture of a crazy Christmas tree drawn by a happy child. Which is a most peculiar way for music to sound.

But, attention! The curtain is up. Bottle greens and fantastic reds. Here is a scene as if the music Mr. Prokofieff were waving out of the orchestra had come to life. Lines that look like the music sounds. Colors that embrace one another in tender dissonances. Yes, like that.

And here, galubcheck (I think it's galubcheck), are the actors. What is it all about? Ah, Mr. Prokofieff knows and Boris knows and maybe the actors know. But all it is necessary for us to know is that music and color and a quaint, almost gargoylian, caprice are tumbling around in front of our eyes and ears.

And there is M. Jacques Coini. He will not participate in the world premier. Except in spirit. Now M. Coini is present in the flesh. He wears a business suit, spats of tan and a gray fedora. M. Coini is the stage director. He instructs the actors how to act. He tells the choruses where to chorus and what to do with their hands, masks, feet, voices, eyes and noses.

The hobgoblin extravaganza Mr. Prokofieff wrote unfolds itself with rapidity. Theater habitues eavesdropping on the rehearsal mumble in the half-dark that there was never anything like this seen on earth or in heaven. Mr. Anisfeld's scenery explodes like a succession of medieval skyrockets. A phantasmagoria of sound, color and action crowds the startled proscenium. For there is no question but that the proscenium, with the names of Verdi, Bach, Haydn and Beethoven chiseled on it, is considerably startled.

Through this business of skyrockets and crescendos and hobgoblins M. Coini stands out like a lighthouse in a cubist storm. However bewildering the plot, however humpty-dumpty the music, M. Coini is intelligible drama. His brisk little figure in its pressed pants, spats and fedora, bounces around amid the apoplectic disturbances like some busybody Alice in an operatic Wonderland.

The opus mounts. The music mounts. Singers attired as singers were never attired before crawl on, bounce on, tumble on. And M. Coini, as undisturbed as a traffic cop or a loop pigeon, commands his stage. He tells the singers where to stand while they sing, and when they don't sing to suit him he sings himself. He leads the chorus on and tells it where to dance, and when they don't dance to suit him he dances himself. He moves the scenery himself. He fights with Mr. Prokofieff while the music splashes and roars around him. He fights with Boris. He fights with electricians and wigmakers.

* * * * *

It is admirable. M. Coini, in his tan spats and gray fedora, is more fantastic than the entire cast of devils and Christmas trees and lollypops, who seem to be the leading actors in the play. Mr. Prokofieff and Miss Garden have made a mistake. They should have let M. Coini play "The Love for Three Oranges" all by himself. They should have let him be the dream-towers and the weird chorus, the enchantress and the melancholy prince. M. Coini is the greatest opera I have ever seen. All he needed was M. Prokofieff's music and the superbly childish visions of the medieval Boris for a background.

The music leaps into a gaudy balloon and sails away in marvelous zigzags, way over the heads of the hobgoblins on the stage and the music critics off the stage. Miss Garden beckons with her shillalah. Mr. Prokofieff arrives panting at her side. He bows, kisses the back of her hand and stands at attention. Also the medieval face of Mr. Anisfeld drifts gently through the gloom and joins the two.

The first act of "The Oranges" is over. Two critics exchanging opinions glower at Mr. Prokofieff. One says: "What a shame! What a shame! Nobody will understand it." The other agrees. But perhaps they only mean that music critics will fail to understand it and that untutored ones like ourselves will find in the hurdy-gurdy rhythms and contortions of Mr. Prokofieff and Mr. Anisfeld a strange delight. As if some one had given us a musical lollypop to suck and rub in our hair.

* * * * *

I have an interview with Mr. Prokofieff to add. The interview came first and doesn't sit well at the end of these notes. Because Mr. Prokofieff, sighing a bit nervously in expectation of the world's premier, said: "I am a classicist. I derive from the classical composers."

This may be true, but the critics will question it. Instead of quoting Mr. Prokofieff at this time, it may be more apropos merely to say that I would rather see and listen to his opera than to the entire repertoire of the company put together. This is not criticism, but a prejudice in favor of fantastic lolly-pops.



NOTES FOR A TRAGEDY

Jan Pedlowski came home yesterday and found that his wife had run away. There was supper on the table. And under the soup plate was a letter addressed to Jan. It read, in Polish:

"I am sick and tired. You keep on nagging me all the time and I can't stand it any more. You will be better off without me.

"Paula."

Jan ate his supper and then put his hat and coat on and went over to see the sergeant at the West Chicago Avenue police station. The sergeant appeared to be busy, so Jan waited. Then he stepped forward and said:

"My wife has run away. I want to catch her."

The sergeant was lacking in sympathy. He told Jan to go home and wait and that the missus would probably come back. And that if she didn't he could get a divorce.

"I don't want a divorce," said Jan. "I want to catch her."

* * * * *

But Jan went home. It was no use running around looking for her and losing sleep. And, besides, he had to be in court tomorrow. The landlord had left a notice that the Pedlowskis must get out of their flat because they didn't pay their rent.

Before coming home Jan had arranged with the foreman at the plating works for two hours off, to be taken out of his pay. He could come to work at seven and work until half-past nine, then go to court and be back, maybe, by half-past eleven.

So Jan went to bed. He put the letter his wife had left in his coat pocket, because he had a vague idea it might be evidence. He might show it to somebody and maybe it would help.

It was snowing when Jan left the plating works in the morning to come to court. He arrived at the City Hall and wandered around, confused by the crowd of people pouring in and out of the elevators. But it was growing late and he only had two hours off. So Jan made inquiries. Where was the court where he should go?

"Judge Barasa on the eighth floor," said the starter. Jan went there.

A lot of people were in the court room. Jan sat down among them and looked like them—blank, uninterested, as if waiting for a train in the railroad station.

One thing worried Jan. The two hours off. If they didn't call him he'd be late and the foreman would be mad. He might lose his job, and jobs were hard to get. It took five weeks to get this one. It would take longer now.

But they called Jan Pedlowski and he came forward to where the judge sat. At first Jan had felt confused and frightened. He had worried about coming to court and standing before the judge. Now it seemed all right. Everybody was nice and businesslike. A lawyer said:

"There's almost two months' rent due now. Eighteen dollars for the November rent and $27.50 for December."

"Can you pay the rent?" the judge asked of Jan.

Jan looked and blinked and tried to think of something to say. He could only think of "My wife Paula ran away last night. Here, she wrote this letter left me on the table when I come home last night."

"I see," said the judge. "But what about the rent? If I give you until January 10, do you think you can pay it?"

"I don't know," said Jan, rubbing his eyes. "I got job now, but they going to layoff after new year. If I have job I pay it all. I can pay $10 now."

"Have you got it with you," asked the judge.

"Yes," said Jan. "I was going to buy Christmas present for Paula, but she ran away."

* * * * *

Jan handed over the $10 and listened to the judge explain that he would be allowed to stay where he was until January 10 and have till then to pay his rent. When this was over he walked out, putting his hat on too soon, so that the bailiff cried: "Hats off in the courtroom." Jan grabbed his hat and grew red.

Now he had almost a full hour and a half before going to the factory. It had taken less time than he thought. Jan started to walk. It was cold and the streets were slippery. He walked along with his hands in the frayed pockets of his overcoat and his breath congealing over his walrus mustache.

His eyes were set and his face serious. Jan's thoughts were simple. Rent—Paula—jobs. Christmas, perhaps, too. But he walked along like anybody else in the loop.

* * * * *

Jan wandered as far as Quincy and La Salle streets. Here he stopped and looked around. It was beginning to snow heavier now. He stood still like a man waiting. And having nothing to do he took the letter his wife had left under the soup plate and read it again.

When Jan had folded the letter up and started to walk once more his eyes suddenly lighted up. He turned and started to run and as he ran he cried: "Paula, Paula!" Some of the crowd moving on paused and looked at a stocky man with a heavy mustache running across the street and shouting a woman's name.

The cabs were thick at the moment and it was hard running across. But Jan kept on, his overcoat flapping behind him and his short legs jumping up and down as he moved. A young woman with a cheap fur around her neck had stopped. There were others who paused to watch Jan. But this young woman was one of the few who didn't smile.

She waited as if puzzled for a moment and then started to lose herself in the crowd. She walked swiftly ahead, her eyes anxiously on the corner. And in the meantime Jan came galumphing toward the curbing still crying: "Paula, Paula!" At the curbing, however, Jan came to a full stop. His toe had caught the cement and he shot forward, landing on his hands and chin.

A crowd gathered around Jan and some one helped him to his feet. His chin was bleeding and his hands were scraped from hitting the cold pavement. He made no sign, however, of injury, but stood blinking in the direction the young woman with the cheap fur had gone.

A policeman arrived and inquired sympathetically what was wrong. Jan brushed himself mechanically as the policeman spoke. Then he answered: "Nothing, I fell down." The policeman went away and Jan turned back to catch a Milwaukee Avenue street car.

He stood on the corner waiting and fingering his bruised chin. He seemed to be getting impatient as the car failed to appear. Finally he thrust his hand inside his pocket and drew out the letter again. He held it without reading for an instant and then tore it up.

When the car came Jan was still tearing up the letter, his thick fingers trying vainly to divide it into tinier bits.



CORAL, AMBER AND JADE

There are no gold and scarlet lanterns bobbing like fat little oriental Pierrots over this street. No firecracker colors daub its sad walls. Walk the whole length and not a dragon or a thumbnail balcony or a pigtail will you see.

Instead, a very efficient, very conservative Chinatown and a colony of very efficient and very matter-of-fact Chinamen who have gradually taken possession of a small district around Twenty-second Street and Wentworth Avenue. A rather famous district in its way, where once the city's tenderloin put forth its red shadows.

But now as you walk, the night stares evilly out of wooden ruins. Stretches of sagging, empty buildings, whose windows and doors seem to have been chewed away, an intimidating silence, a graveyard of crumbling little houses—these remain. And you see Venus, grown old and toothless, snoozing amid the debris of another day.

Then the Chinamen begin. Lights twinkle. Clean-looking interiors and carefully washed store windows. Roofs have been hammered back in place, stairways nailed together again. The sagging walls and lopsided cottages have taken a new lease on life. Another of the innumerable little business districts that dot the city has fought its way into evidence.

There are few oddities. Through the glass of the store fronts you see curiously immobile groups, men seated in chairs, smoking long pipes and waiting in silence. Strange fruits, foods, herbs, cloths, trinkets, lie on the orderly shelves around them. The floors look scrubbed and there is an absence of litter. It is all very efficient and very natural except for the immobility of the men in the chairs and the silence that seems to have descended on them.

* * * * *

A Chinese silence. And if you linger in the neighborhood you begin to feel that this is more Chinese than the gaudy dragons and the firecracker daubs and the bobbing paper lanterns of fiction.

This night I am looking for Billy Lee. No. 2209 Wentworth Avenue, says Mr. Lee's card. We are to talk over some matters, one of which has already been made public, others of which may never be.

He sits in his inner office, attired like a very efficient American business man, does Mr. Lee. We say hello and start the talk. In the rooms outside the inner office are a dozen Chinese. But there is no sound. They are sitting in chairs or standing up. All smoking. All silent. A sense of strange preoccupation lies over the place. Yet one feels that the twelve silent men are preoccupied with nothing except, possibly, the fact that they are Chinese.

Mr. Lee himself is none too garrulous. We have been talking for several minutes when he becomes totally silent and after a long pause hands me a cablegram. The cablegram reads: "Hongkong—Ying Yan: Bandits captured Foo Wing and wife. Send $5,000 immediately. Signed: Taichow."

* * * * *

"I just received this," says Mr. Lee. "Ying Yan is my father. Foo Wing is my brother. His American name is Andrew Lee. He went to Hongkong ten months ago and was married. This is terrible. I am worried to death."

Mr. Lee appears to sink into a studious calm. His eyes regard the cablegram stolidly. He remarks at length: "Bad news. This is very bad news."

From outside comes a sudden singsong of Chinese. One of the twelve men has said something. He finishes. Silence resumes. There seems to be no answer. Mr. Lee puts the cablegram back in his pocket and some one knocks on the door.

"Come in," says Mr. Lee. A Chinese youth enters. He carries a bundle.

"Meet Mr. Tang," says Billy Lee. We shake hands and Mr. Tang begins talking in Chinese. Mr. Lee listens, nods his head and then holds out his hand for the bundle.

"This is a very interesting event," says Mr. Lee in English. "Mr. Tang is just over from the Orient. He comes from north of China, from Wu Chang, where the revolution started, you know. He has with him a very interesting matter."

Mr. Lee unwraps the bundle. He removes a long necklace made of curiously carved wooden beads, large balls of jade and pendants of silk and semi-precious stones.

Next he removes a second necklace somewhat longer than the first. It is made of marvelously matched amber beads, balls of jade and pendants of coral.

"A very interesting matter," says Mr. Lee. "Mr. Tang is son of a formerly very wealthy and high-born mandarin family. But his family has lost everything and Mr. Tang is here seeking an education in modern business. He has left of his family's wealth only these two things here. They are necklaces such as only mandarins could wear when they appeared before the emperor in court in the old days.

"You see these have three pendants, so they show the mandarin was a gentleman of the third class under the emperor. They have been in Mr. Tang's family's possession for generations. You will notice this one of carved beads is made of beads which are formed from the pits of the Chinese olive. There are two hundred beads and on each is carved some figure or scene which in all represent the history of China."

* * * * *

Mr. Lee holds the two necklaces in his hand. Mr. Tang stands by silently. His eyes gaze at the beads.

"Your father wore them at court?" inquires Mr. Lee in the manner of a host.

Mr. Tang nods his head slowly and adds a word in Chinese.

"He says his family wore them for generations," explains Mr. Lee. "Now the family is vanished and all that is left are these insignia of their nobility. And Mr. Tang wishes me to dispose of them for him so he may have money to go to school."

Mr. Lee and Mr. Tang are then both silent. Mr. Lee slips one of the necklaces over his head. It hangs down over his American coat and American silk shirt in a rather incongruous way. But there seems to be nothing incongruous in the matter for Lee and Tang. Billy Lee with the necklace around his neck, the three mandarin pendants against his belt, looks at Mr. Tang and Mr. Tang bows and leaves.

Our matters have been fully discussed and I follow a half-hour later. There are still twelve men in the room. They stand and sit and smoke. None speaks. I notice in the group the immobile figure of Mr. Tang. He is smoking an American cigarette—one of the twelve silently preoccupied residents of Chinatown who have gathered in Billy Lee's place to wait for something.



MEDITATION IN E MINOR

Well, well, well. The lady pianist will now oblige with something very refined. When in the name of 750,000 gods of reason will I ever learn enough to stay at home and go to bed instead of searching kittenishly for diversion in neighborhood movie and vaudeville houses?

No. Wrong. The lady is not a pianist. She is merely an accompanist. She is going to accompany something on cares? They are no more than the ripples which one's ego a face! Two hundred and eighty-five years old, if a day.

Aha! His nobs. A fiddler. "Silver Threads Among the Gold," and something fancy from the opera. And all dressed up in his wedding suit. The white tie is a bit soiled and the white vest longs mutely for the laundryman. And if he's going to wear a dress suit, if he insists upon wearing a dress suit, why doesn't he press his pants?

But how did a man with a face like this ever happen to think he could fiddle? An English nobleman. Or maybe a Swedish nobleman. Hm! A very interesting face. A little bit touched with flabbiness. And somewhat soiled, intangibly soiled. Like an English nobleman or a Swedish nobleman who has stayed up all night drinking.

And he holds his fiddle in an odd way. Like what? Well, like a fiddler. Like a marvelous fiddler. It hangs limply from his hand as if it were nonexistent. Kreisler holds his fiddle like that. A close-cropped blond mustache and the beginnings of a paunch. Nevertheless a very refined gentleman, a baron somewhat the worse for a night of bourbon.

The idiotic orchestra, the idiotic orchestra! Did anybody ever hear such an idiotic orchestra? Three violins, one cello, one cornet, one flute and a drum all out of tune, all out of time. The prelude. And his nobs grins. Poor fellow. But who taught him how to hold a fiddle like that?

We're off. An E minor chord from our friend at the piano. Hm, something classical. Ho, ho! Viotti. Well, well, here's a howdeedo. His nobs is going to play the concerto. Good-by, good luck and God bless him. If I was in bed, if I was in bed, I wouldn't have to listen to a refined gentleman with his swell pants unpressed murdering poor Viotti. A swell gentleman with his eyes carefully made up. I didn't notice his eyes before. All set, Paganini. Your turn. Let's go.

Ah, that was a note! Well, well, well, his nobs can play. Hm! A cadenza in double stops! And the E minor scale in harmonics! Listen to the baron in the dirty white vest. The man's a violinist. Observe—calisthenics on the G string and in the second position. A very difficult position and easily faked. And when did Heifetz ever take a run like that? Up, down and the fingers hammering like thoroughbreds on a fast track. Pizzicato with the left hand and obbligato glissando!

Hoopla! The fellow's showing off! And it isn't a Drdla souvenir or a vaudeville Brahms arrangement. But twenty years of practice. Yes, sir, there are twenty years and eight hours a day, every day for twenty years, in these acrobatics. There are twenty years, twenty years, behind this technique. And well-spent years.

But tell me, Cyril, for whom is our baron showing off—for whom? Our baron with the soiled tie and the made-up eyes, fiddling coldly, elaborately for a handful of annoyed flappers, amused shoe clerks and bored home lovers sitting stolidly in the dark, waiting stolidly and defiantly to be diverted?

Bravo! Five of us applaud. No, six. A gentleman in an upper box applauds with some degree of violence. And there is the orchestra leader—a dark-skinned, black-eyed, curly-headed youth, nodding and smiling.

Next on the program? Ah, a ballad. A thing the cabaret ladies sing, "Do You Think of Me?" A faint smile on our baron's face. But the fiddle leaps into position as if for another cold, elaborate attack. It takes twenty years, twenty well-spent years to learn to hold a bow like that. Firmly, casually, indifferently as one holds a pencil between one's fingers.

Admission 33 cents, including war tax. But this is worth—well, it is what the novelists call an illuminating experience. This gentleman of music whose fingers have for twenty years absorbed the souls of Beethoven and Sarasate, Liszt and Moussorgski, this aristocrat of the catgut is posturing sardonically before the three bored fates. He is pouring twenty years, twenty well-spent years, into a tawdry little ballad. Ah, how our baron's fiddle sings! And the darkened faces in front hum to themselves: "When you're flirt-ing with another, do you ever think—of—me."

Yes, my tired-faced baron, there's a question. Do you? We, out front, all have our little underworlds in which we live sometimes while music plays and beautiful things come to our eyes. And yours? This tin-pan alley ballad throbbing liquidly from the strings of your fiddle—"When you're flirt-ing with another do you ever think—of—me?" Of the twenty years, the twenty well-spent years? Of the soul that your fingers captured? Of the dream that took form in your firm wrist?

And now the chorus once more. In double stops. In harmonics. With arpeggios thrown in. And once more, largo. Sure and full. Sobbing organ notes, whimpering grace notes. Superb, baron! And done with a half smile at the darkened faces out front. The tired faces that blinked stolidly at Viotti. A smile at the orchestra leader who stands with his mouth open waiting as if the song were still in the air.

Applause. All of us this time. More applause. Say this guy can fiddle, he can. Come on, baron, another tune. The tired faces yammer for another ditty. "Traeumerei." All right, let her go, Paganini. And after that the "Missouri Waltz."

* * * * *

I will stay for the next show. I will stay for the three shows. And each time this magnifico will come out and make music. But better than that. I will go back stage and talk with him. I will ask him: "How does it happen, sir, that a man who can fiddle like you, a man who could play a duet with Kreisler—how does it happen you're fiddling in a neighborhood movie and vaudeville house?"

And he will unfold a story. Yes, there's a story there. Something happened to this nobleman of the soiled white vest and the marvelous fingers. There was an occurrence in this man's life which would make a good climax for a second act.

No, that would spoil the picture. To find out, to learn the clumsy mechanism behind this charming spectacle would take away. Better like this. The lady at the piano. Ah, indeed, the lady at the piano, a very elderly lady with a thin nose and hair that was once extremely beautiful, perhaps she had something to do with it? The orchestra pounds and scrapes away. And the movie jumps around and the heroine weeps, but somebody saves her. "Where there is no faith there cannot be true love," confesses the hero, folding her in his well-pressed arms. And that's that.

Now our friend, the baron, again. No, better to leave. He has left his smile in the wings this time. He is very serious or perhaps very tired. Two times tonight to play. Too much—too much.

My hat, and I will walk out on his nobs. And, anyway, Huneker wrote the story long ago. About a piano player in Coney Island that he called—what was it? Oh, yes, "A Chopin of the Gutter."



TEN-CENT WEDDING RINGS

A gloomy day and the loop streets grimace behind a mist. The electric signs are lighted. The buildings open like great fans in the half dark.

The streets invite a mood of melodrama. Windows glint evilly. Doorways grin with rows of electric teeth. This, Jonnerrvetter! is the Great City of the old-time ten-twenty-thirty thrillers. The devourer of innocence, the strumpet of stone.

I walk along humming a bar of villainous music, the "skeeter scale" that the orchestra used to turn turn turn taaaa-tum in the old Alhambra as the two dockwallopers and the leering Chinaman were climbing in through little Mabel's hall bedroom window to abduct her.

Those were happy days for the drama, when a scoundrel was a scoundrel and wore a silk hat to prove it, and a hero was a two-fisted man, as anybody could tell by a glance at his marcelled hair and his open-at-the-throat shirt.

Tum tum tum tum taaaa-tum. Pizzicato pianissimo, says the direction on the score. So we are all set for a melodrama. Here is the Great City back-drop. Here are the grim-faced crowds shuffling by under the jaundice glare of electric signs. And Christmas is coming. A vague gray snow trickles out of the gloom.

A proper time for melodrama. All we need is a plot. Come, come now—a plot alive with villains and weeping maidens. Halto! The window of the 5—and 10-cent store! a tumble of gewgaws and candies and kitchen utensils. Christmas tree tinsel and salted peanuts, jazz music and mittens.

The curtain is up. Egad, what a masterly scene. A kitchen Coney Island. A puzzle picture of isles, signs, smells, noises. Cinderella wandering wistfully in the glass-bead section looking for a fairy godmother.

A clinking obbligato by the cash registers. The poor are buying gifts. This garish froth of merchandise is the back ground of their luxuries. This noisy puzzle-picture store is their horn of plenty. A sad thought and we'll dismiss it. What we want is plot.

Perhaps the jazz-song booster singing out of the side of his mouth with tired eyes leering at the crowd of girls: "Won't You Let Me Love You If I Promise to Be Good?" And "Love Me, Turtle Dove." And "Lovin' Looie." And "The Lovin' Blues."

All lovin'. Jazz songs, ballads, sad, silly, boobish nut songs—all about love me—love me. All about stars and kisses, moonlight and "she took my man away." There are telephones all over the walls and the song booster's voice pops out over the salted-peanut section, over the safety-pin and brassware section. A tinny, nasal voice with a whine and a hoarseness almost hiding the words.

The cash registers clink, clink. "Are you waited on, madam? Five cents a package, madam." The crowds, tired eyed, shabbily dressed, bundle-laden, young, old—the crowds shuffle up and down, staring at gewgaws, and the love-me love songs follow them around. Follow them to the loose-bead counter where Madge with her Japanese puffs of hair, her wad of gum and her black shirtwaist that she keeps straightening out continually by drawing up her bosom and pressing down on her hips with her hands—where Madge holds forth.

Tum tum tum tum taaaa-tum—halto! Here is our plot. Outside the pizzicato of the crowds, the Great City, shining, dragon-eyed, through the mist—the City That Has No Heart. And here under our nose, twinkling up at our eyes, a huge tray full of 10-cent wedding rings. End of Act One.

Act Two, now—Madge, the sharp-tongued, weary-eyed young woman behind the counter. Love-me love songs in her ear and people unraveling, faces unraveling before her. Who buys these wedding rings, Madge? And did you ever notice anything odd about your customers? And why do you suppose they buy ten-cent wedding rings, Madge?

"Just a moment," says Madge. "What is it, miss? A ring? What kind? Oh, yes. Ten cents. Gold or platinum just the same. Yes."

Two giggling girls move off. And Madge, chewing gently on her wad of gum and smoothing her huge hair puffs out with the coyly stiffened palms of her hands, talks.

"Sure, I get you. About the wedding rings. Sure, that's easy. We sell about twenty or thirty of them every day. Oh, mostly to kids—girls and boys. Sometimes an old Johnny comes in with a moth-eaten fur collar and blows a dime for a wedding ring. But mostly girls.

"I sometimes take a second look at them. They usually giggle when they ask for the ring. And they usually pretend it's for somebody as a joke they're buying it. Or sometimes they walk around the counter for a half hour and get me nervous as a cat. 'Cause I know what they want and they can't get their gall up to come and ask for it. But finally they make the break and come up and pick out a ring without saying a word and hand over ten cents.

"There was one girl no more than sixteen just this morning. She come here all full of pep and kidded about things and said wasn't them platinum wedding rings just too grand for words, and so on. Then she said she wanted a half-dozen of them, and was there a discount when bought in such quantity? I started wrapping them up when I looked at her and she was crying. And she dropped her sixty cents on the counter and said: 'Never mind, never mind. I don't want them. I can't wear them. They'll only make it worse.'"

A middle-aged-looking man interrupts. "What is it, sir?" asks Madge. "Anything in rings? What kind?" "Oh, just plain rings," says the man with a great show of indifference, while his eyes ferret among the trinkets on the counter. And then, very calmly: "Oh, these will do, I guess." Two wedding rings, and he spent twenty cents. Madge follows him with her eyes. "That's it," she whispers, "usually the men buy two. One for themselves and one for the girl. Or if it's the girl that's buying them it's one for herself and one for her girl chum who's going with her and the two fellas on the party. Say, take it from me, these rings don't ever hear no wedding marches."

* * * * *

Back into the gloomy street again. A plot in our head, but who's the villain and who's the heroine and the hero? An easy answer to that. The crowd here—sad faced, tired-walking, bundle-laden. The crowd continually dissolving amid street cars and autos is the villain.

A crowd of shoppers buying slippers for uncle and shawls for mother and mufflers for brother and some bars of soap for the bathroom. Buying everything and anything that fill the fan-shaped buildings with their glinting windows. Buying carpet sweepers and window curtains and linoleum.

Pizzicato, pianissimo, professor—little-girl gigglers and hard-faced dock wallopers and slick-haired lounge lizards and broken-hearted ones—twenty a day they sidle up to Madge's counter, where the love me, love me songs razz the heavy air, and shoot a dime for a wedding ring.



WHERE THE "BLUES" SOUND

"That St. Louis woman Wid her diahmond rings, Pulls mah man 'round By her apron strings—"

A voice screeches above the boom and hurrah of the black and white 35th Street cabaret. The round tables rock. Waiters careen. Balanced trays float at crazy angles through the tobacco smoke. Hats flash. Firecracker voices explode. A guffaw dances across a smear of faces. Congo gleams, college boy pallors, the smiles of black and white men and women interlace. A spotlight shoots its long hypotenuse upon the floor. In its drifting oval the entertainer, her shoulders back, her elbows out, her fists clenched and her body twisting into slow patterns, bawls in a terrifying soprano—

"If it waren't foh her powdah And her stohe bought hair. The man Ah love Would not have gone nowhere—"

Listen for the tom-tom behind the hurrah. Watch for the torches of Kypris and Corinth behind the glare of the tungstens. This is the immemorial bacchanal lurching through the kaleidoscope of the centuries. Pan with a bootlegger's grin and a checked suit. Dionysius with a saxophone to his lips. And the dance of Paphos called now the shimmie.

Listen and watch and through the tumult, rising like a strange incense from the smear of bodies, tables and waiters, will come the curious thing that is never contained in the vice reports. The gleam of the devil himself—the echo of some mystic cymbal note.

Later the music will let out a tinny blaze of sound. Men and women will press together and a pack of bodies will sway on the dance floor. The tungstens will go out and the spotlight will throw colors—green, purple, lavender, blue, violet—and as the scene grows darker and the colors revolve a howl will fill the place. But on the dance floor a silence will fasten itself over the swaying bodies and there will be only the sound of feet pushing. The silence of a ritual—faces stiffened, eyes rolling—a rigid embrace of men and women creeping cunningly among the revolving colors and the whiplike rhythms of the jazz band.

* * * * *

"Lost souls," says the vice reports, and the vice reports speak with a calm and knowing voice. Women whose bodies and faces are like shells of evil; vicious seeming men with a rasp in their laughter. These are among those present. Aphrodite is a blousy wench in the 35th and State streets neighborhood. And her votaries, although they offer an impressive ensemble, are a sorry lot taken face by face.

Izzy, who is an old timer, sits at a table and takes it in. Izzy's eyes and ears have learned to pick details in a bedlam. He can talk softly and listen easily through the height of the cabaret racket. The scene hits Izzy as water hits a duck's back.

"Well," he says, "it's a good night tonight. The slummers are out in full force rubberin' at each other. Well, this is a funny world, take it from me. Me? Huh, I come here every night or so to have a little drink and look 'em over for a while. Ain't nothing to see but a lot o' molls and a lot of sucker guys. Them? Say, they never learn no better. Tough guys ain't no different from soft guys, see? They all fall for the dames just as hard and just as worse. There's many a good guy in this place that's been gave a tumble by them, see?

"There, I got an idee he'd blow in tonight. He ain't missed a Saturday night for months. And he usu'lly makes it four or five times a week. That guy over there wit' the mop o' gray hair. Yeah, that's him. Well, he's the professor. I spotted him in the district a year or so ago. He had a dame wit' him who I know, see? A terrible broad. Say, maybe you've heard of him. His name is Weintraub. I picked it up from the dame he's goin' wit', see? He ought to be in your line. He was a reg'lar music professor before he come down. The leader of a swell orchestra somewhere in the east or in Europe, I guess. The dame don't know for sure, but she told me he was some baby on music.

"Well, that's him there, see? He comes in like this and sits down near the band. Look at him. Do you make him? The way he's movin' his hands? See, he's leadin' the band. Sure"—Izzy laughed mirthlessly—"that's what the guy's doin'. Nuts, see? Daffy. He comes in here like that and I always watch him. He sits still and when the music starts up he begins wit' his hands. Ain't he the berries?

"Now keep your eye on him. You'll see somethin' pretty quick. He's alone tonight. I guess the dame has shook him for the evenin'. Look, he's still conductin'. Ain't he rich? But he's got a good face, you might say. Class, eh? You'd know he was a musician.

"I tell you I begin to watch him the first time I saw him. And from the beginnin' he's always conductin' when the band starts in. The dame is usu'lly wit' him and she don't like it. She tries to stop him, but he don't see her for sour apples. He keeps right on like now, beatin' time wit' his hands. Look, the poor nut's growin' excited. Daffy. Can you beat it? There he goes. See? That's on account of Jerry. Jerry's the black one on the end wit' the saxophone. Ha, Jerry always does it.

"I told Jerry about this guy and Jerry tried it on him the first night. He pulled a sour one, you know, blew a mean one through the horn and his nobs nearly fell out of his seat. Like now. See, he's through. He won't conduct the band any more tonight. He's sore. No sir, he won't conduct such a lot of no-good boilermakers like Jerry. Can you beat it?"

* * * * *

Izzy's eyes follow a stoop-shouldered gray-haired man from one of the tables. A thin-faced man with bloodshot eyes. He walks as if he were half asleep. The crowd swallows him and Izzy laughs again without mirth.

"He's done for the night. That's low down of Jerry. But Jerry says it gets his goat to see this daffy guy comin' in here night after night and leadin' the band from the table. So the smoke blows that sour note every time his nobs gets started on his conductin' and it always knocks his nobs for a gool. He never stays another minute, but lights out right away.

"Look, there's his dame. The one wit' the green hat, sittin' wit' the guy with the cheaters over there. Yeah, that's her. I don't know why she ain't wit' him tonight. Prob'ly a lovers' quarrel." And Izzy grinned. "She's a tough one, take it from me. I don't know how she hooked the professor, but she did. She used to be swelled up about him. And once she got him a job in Buxbaum's old place, she told me, to work in the orchestra. But his nobs kicked. Said he'd cut his throat before playin' in a roughneck orchestra and who did she think he was to do such a thing? He says to her: I'm Weintraub—Weintraub, d'ye understand?' And he hauls off and wallops her one and she guve up tryin' to get him a job. It makes her sore to watch him sittin' around like tonight and conductin' the orchestra. She says it ain't because he's daffy, but on account of his bein' stuck up."

The woman with the green hat had left her table. Izzy's shrewd eyes picked her out again—this time standing against a far wall talking to the professor, and the professor was rubbing his forehead and saying "No, no," with his hands.

And now the entertainer was singing again:

"Got de St. Louis Blues, jes' as blue as Ah can be, Dat man has a heart like a rock ca-ast in de sea, Or else he would not have gone so far away from me."



VAGABONDIA

Here they come. Five merry travelers in a snorting, dust-caked automobile. Wanderers, egad! Bowling rakishly across the country. Dusters and goggles and sunburn. Prairie nights have sung to them. Little towns have grinned at them. Mountains, valleys, forests and stars have danced across their windshield.

The newspaper man stood watching them haul up to the Adams Street curb. His heart was tired of tall buildings and the endless grimace of windows. Here was a chariot out of another world. Motor vagabonds. Scooting into a city with a swagger to their dust-caked wheels. And scooting out again.

The newspaper man thought, "The world isn't buried yet. There's still a restlessness left. Things change from triremes to motor boats, from Rosinante to automobiles. But adventure merely mounts a new seat and goes on. Dick Hovey sang it once:

"I am fevered with the sunset, I am fretful with the bay, For the wander thirst is on me And my soul is in Cathay."

The five merry travelers crawled out and stretched themselves. They doffed their goggles and slipped off their linen dusters and changed forthwith from a group of flying gnomes into five tired-looking citizens of California. Two middle aged women. Two middle-aged men and a son.

One of the men said, "Well, we'll lay up here for awhile, I got a blister on my hand from the wheel."

One of the women answered, "I must buy some hairpins, Martin."

The newspaper man said to himself, "What ho! I'll give them a ring. Why not? A story of the modern wanderlust. Anyway, they're not averse to publicity seeing they've got two 'coast to coast' pennants on the back of their machine. What they've seen. Why they've journeyed. A tirade against the monotony of business. And I'll stick in one of Hovey's stanzas, the one that goes:

"There's a schooner in the offing With her topsails shot with fire. And my heart has gone aboard her For the Islands of Desire."

"You can say," said the spokesman of the wanderers, "that this is Martin S. Stevers and party. I am Mr. Stevers of the Stevers Linseed Oil Company in San Francisco. Here's my card."

"Thanks," said the newspaper man, taking the card.

"And now," spake on the spokesman of the wanderers, "what can I do for you?"

Newspaper men are perhaps the only creatures who as a type never learn how to ask questions. An embarrassment caused by the stupidity of the gabby great whom they interrogate daily puts a crimp into their tongues. Their questions wince in anticipation of the banalities they are doomed to elicit. Their curiosity collapses under the shadow of the inevitable, impending bromide.

Thus the newspaper man, wearily certain that regardless of what he asks or how he asks it, he will hear for answers only the clumsy asininities behind which the personalities, leaders and sacred white cows pompously attitudinize, gets so that he mumbles a bit incoherently.

But here was a different case. Here were merry travelers with memories of wind-swept valleys and star-capped mountains to chatter on. So the newspaper man unearthed his vocabulary, tilted his hat a trifle and smiled invitingly.

"Well," said he to the spokesman of the wanderers, "The kind of story I'd like to get would be a story about five people wandering across the country. You know. Hills, sunsets, trees and how those things drive away the monotony that fills up the hearts of city folk. What you enjoyed on the trip and the advantages of a rover over a swivel-chair statistician."

An eloquence was beginning to skip around on the newspaper man's tongue. His heart, weary of tall buildings and the endless grimace of city windows, began to warm under the visions his phrases aroused.

Then he paused. One of the women had interrupted. "Go on Martin, you can tell him all that. And don't forget about the lovely hotel breakfast room in Des Moines."

Martin, however, hesitated. He was a heavy-set, large-faced man with expansive features almost devoid of expression. Suddenly his face lighted up. His hands jumped together and he rubbed their palms enthusiastically.

"I see," he said with profundity. "I see."

"Yes," breathed the newspaper man.

"Well," said Mr. Stevers, "the first thing I'd like to tell you, young man, is about the car. You won't believe this, but we've been making twenty miles on a gallon, that is, averaging twenty miles on each and every gallon, sir, since we left San Francisco. Pretty good, eh?"

On a piece of scratch paper the newspaper man obediently wrote, "twenty miles, gallon."

"And then," went on the spokesman for the wanderers, "Our speed, eh? You'd like to know that? Well, without stretching the thing at all, and you can verify it from any of my party, we've averaged twenty-six miles an hour all the time out. I tell you the old boat had to travel some to do that."

'"Twenty-six miles," scribbled the newspaper man, adding after it, "The man's an idiot."

Mr. Stevers, unmindful, loosened up. The price of gasoline. The price of breakfasts. The condition of the roads. How long a stretch they had been able to do without a halt. How many hours a day he himself had stuck at the wheel. When he had finished the newspaper man bowed and walked abruptly away.

* * * * *

The newspaper man's thoughts form a conclusion.

"It's true, then," he thought, "the world's becoming as stupid as it looks. People are drying up inside with facts, figures, dollar signs. This man and his party would have got as much out of their cross-country trip if they'd all been blindfolded and shot through a tunnel two thousand feet under the ground. Man is like an audience and he has walked out on mystery and adventure. The show kind of tired him. And got his goat. It would have been a good yarn otherwise, the motor vagabonds. I'd have ended with Hovey's verse:

"I must forth again tomorrow, With the sunset I must be Hull down on the trail of rapture In the wonder of the sea."

Mumbling the lines to himself, the newspaper man strode on through the crowded loop with a sudden swagger in his eyes.



NIRVANA

The newspaper man felt a bit pensive. He sat in his bedroom frowning at his typewriter. About eight years ago he had decided to write a novel. Not that he had anything particular in his mind to write about. But the city was such a razzle-dazzle of dreams, tragedies, fantasies; such a crazy monotone of streets and windows that it filled the newspaper man's thought from day to day with an irritating blur.