r down a fat old man got out,
muttering, 'Why don't they keep those brats off the stages!' The next
time you were still howling. You were about six, and you had been taken
to the old Booth Theatre at the corner of Twenty-third Street and Sixth
Avenue, and had seen 'Little Red Riding Hood,' and when the wolf said,
'All the better to eat you with, my dear,' you burst into a frightened
bawl, and had to be hurried out. Soon after I saw you on a balcony near
the Square watching a political procession go by. Then there were a few
years that I missed you, and then a period when I saw you often. I had
grown rather to like you, until one Thanksgiving Day morning. You
snubbed me direct. There were buses covered with coloured bunting in
front of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. You climbed on one. Again you were
howling, this time methodically, deliberately, in chorus with a number
of other young lunatics. I tried my best to be friendly, but not a look
would you give me. You were too busy shouting and waving a flag. Say, do
you want any more of those little personal reminiscences?"

I did not. I mumbled a few words of lame apology, pleading the
thoughtlessness of youth. The excuses were apparently taken in the
proper spirit, for again the voice was tearful.

"Ah, but those were the good old days! Out here I love to think of them
and to recall my youth. I am battered now, and my joints creak. But
once I was all fresh paint and varnish, one of the aristocrats of city
travel. How I used to look down upon the bob-tailed cars at the
cross-town streets. Besides I was not merely one of the splendid Old
Guard, I was _the_ bus--the one of which they used to tell the famous
story. Others may claim the distinction, but they are impostors, sir,
rank impostors. I was the bus. What! You don't mean to say that you have
never heard it?"

Humbly I acknowledged my ignorance, and listened to a tale that, I was
assured, had once been told in every club corner and over every dinner
table on the Avenue.

"It was nine o'clock of a blustery March night. Mulligan was not my
driver on the trip, but Casey, who had been imbibing rather freely at
the corner place of refreshment during the wait. Empty we left the
starting point under the 'L. curve on South Fifth Avenue. Empty we
crossed the Square. At the Eighth Street corner, in front of the
Brevoort, we stopped. A gentleman and his wife entered. We proceeded. At
Nineteenth Street we were again hailed. Three young