erated
pretense of not having seen or heard, with their stammering exchange
of unaccustomed formalities, with their false show of a light-hearted
exit I must take leave of my Bohemian party. Mary has robbed me of my
climax; and she may go.

But I am not defeated. Somewhere there exists a great vault miles
broad and miles long--more capacious than the champagne caves of
France. In that vault are stored the anticlimaxes that should have
been tagged to all the stories that have been told in the world. I
shall cheat that vault of one deposit.

Minnie Brown, with her aunt, came from Crocusville down to the city
to see the sights. And because she had escorted me to fishless trout
streams and exhibited to me open-plumbed waterfalls and broken my
camera while I Julyed in her village, I must escort her to the hives
containing the synthetic clover honey of town.

Especially did the custom-made Bohemia charm her. The spaghetti
wound its tendrils about her heart; the free red wine drowned her
belief in the existence of commercialism in the world; she was
dared and enchanted by the rugose wit that can be churned out of
California claret.

But one evening I got her away from the smell of halibut and
linoleum long enough to read to her the manuscript of this story,
which then ended before her entrance into it. I read it to her
because I knew that all the printing-presses in the world were
running to try to please her and some others. And I asked her about
it.

"I didn't quite catch the trains," said she. "How long was Mary in
Crocusville?"

"Ten hours and five minutes," I replied.

"Well, then, the story may do," said Minnie. "But if she had stayed
there a week Kappelman would have got his kiss."

THE FERRY OF UNFULFILMENT

At the street corner, as solid as granite in the "rush-hour" tide
of humanity, stood the Man from Nome. The Arctic winds and sun had
stained him berry-brown. His eye still held the azure glint of the
glaciers.

He was as alert as a fox, as tough as a caribou cutlet and as
broad-gauged as the aurora borealis. He stood sprayed by a Niagara
of sound--the crash of the elevated trains, clanging cars, pounding
of rubberless tires and the antiphony of the cab and truck-drivers
indulging in scarifying repartee. And so, with his gold dust cashed
in to the merry air of a hundred thousand, and with the cakes and
ale of one week in Gotham turning bitter on his tongue, the Man from
Nome sighed to set foo