lovely ladies about to go in bathing in a beautiful brook in the woods."

"Stop!" said I, sternly. The piratical old plagiarist of a vehicle was
about to begin filching from another source. There had been a guilty
squeak in the voice that had roused my suspicions. "No doubt," I said,
with pointed sarcasm, "among the many passengers you carried at various
times was the late Mr. Richard Harding Davis. He was a literary man of
parts, and wrote, among other books, a charming little story called 'The
Exiles.'"

"What! Is he d----? I mean I never heard of the gent," was the brazen
response. "There was a Davis, now, a Sebastian Davis, I think the name
was, in the hair-oil business, if I am not mistaken. A little fellow,
with mutton-chop side whiskers. But as I was saying, I don't know
anything better than Fifth Avenue at Madison Square of a summer's night,
with the hobos dozing already on the park benches, and people hanging
round the entrance of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and the men lined up three
deep at the Hoffman bar, and the girls walking by on their way to dance
the minuet at the Haymarket up at Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street. I
said the minuet. Do you get me?" There was an evil chuckle. "Across the
Square Diana is twinkling up there in the sky, and beneath, in the
Garden, they are pulling off a middle-weight bout to a decision. Just
round the corner, in the Madison Square Theatre, you can hear the
clapping. The play is Hoyt's 'A Trip to Chinatown.' Listen:

"'Oh, the Bowery, the Bowery,
They say such things and they do such things
On the Bowery,'

"Or maybe it's:

"'You will think she's going to faint,
But she'll fool you, for she ain't;
She has been there many times before.'"

"I see," said I, for both the theft of ideas and the pretence of
innocence were too flagrant; "that your memories are of what we lovingly
called 'the golden,' and detractors called the 'yellow' nineties. We
were both young once."

But the assumption of friendliness seemed only to irritate.

"The nineties! Why, I was an old man in the nineties! An old, old man! I
wasn't a youngster in the eighties, or the seventies, for that matter.
There's another one of the old Avenue buses on this line. No. 27. He
says he is older than I am. He's a liar. Sometimes I think I am the
oldest bus in all the world, and that I ought to be enjoying myself in
the Smithsonian, instead of dragging out my existence bumping over
boulder