ho perhaps will find it out in his
turn. You see, in my youth I was something of a patron of sport. I knew
them all, and they are all down and out, and I am down and out." There
was a plaintive whine in the spluttering, squeaky voice.

"We knew that our hour was passing. We read the story in the averted
eyes of those who in earlier days we had regarded as our fast friends,
or we heard it in the outspoken, contemptuous remarks of those who had
no regard whatever for our feelings. To strangers, above all, were we
objects of derision. Throaty, mid-western voices made disparaging
comparison reflecting, not only on us, but on our fair city. Visiting
Englishmen surveyed us through monocles and talked of the buses of the
Strand and Regent Street. There was a French artist, a Baron
Somebody-or-other, who afterwards wrote a book called 'New York as I
Have Seen It.' He had married an American girl, the daughter of a
comedian at whose clever whimsicalities my passengers used to laugh
uproariously. I had carried him often--that actor, and knew him as one
of the most genial and companionable of men. One day the Frenchman,
accompanied by his father-in-law, stopped me at a street corner down
near Washington Square, climbed up beside my driver, and rode to the
end of the route. Here, thought I, is where I get a little appreciation.
Here is a critic from the older civilization, a man with a proper
reverence for the past, who can look beyond the freshness of varnish. I
have a right to expect something in the nature of consideration from
him. Bah! All he said was: 'Among the splendid carriages and the
high-priced automobiles, perhaps to prove that we are in a land of
freedom, the black, dirty, wretched omnibuses ply from one end of the
Avenue to the other.' Honest now, wouldn't it jar you?

"I called you Mr. Washington Arch just now. I was wrong," the accents
were now no longer plaintive, but raucous and sneering. If I had doubted
before, there was now no questioning the old rascal's claim to
recognition as a fellow New Yorker. "But I was wrong. You are Mr. Piker
from Uptown Somewhere. Had you been Mr. Arch, you would have recognized
me as soon as I did you. We real ones do not forget. But I have your
number. Would you like me to tell you a few things? Oh, I have your
_dossier_, all right. Let me see. The first time I carried you you were
an infant howling abominably. You were lifted in somewhere in the
'Fifties,' and three blocks farthe