s and prairie grass.

"Come to think of it," the old bus went on meditatively, "the
Smithsonian does not appeal to me after all. I think that I would be
better pleased in a corner of the Third Degree room down at Number 300
Mulberry Street, or in the Chamber of Horrors at the Eden Musee. For, as
you may have noticed, I am partial to crime. It is the result of my
bringing up. It is the excitement of my early days that I miss most now.
When I first came out here it was with a feeling of pleased expectancy.
I anticipated a daily hold-up. I had visions of stage robbers in cambric
masks, and running gun fights, and horses in frightened flight, and my
driver stricken to the heart and tumbling from his seat. But it is a
degenerate and tame world out here. Give me little old New York."

"But the statistics--" I began.

"You do not know one-quarter. The police do not know one-half. But I
know. You have read what the papers have printed, or what some retired
Inspector has seen fit to tell in his Memoirs. You did not pass, night
after night, the sinister house of the woman whose open boast was that,
if she wished to, she could take half the roofs off the Avenue. You did
not know how real that terrible threat was, for you never saw the
cloaked men issuing from its doors bearing their ghastly burdens. You
have heard of the Burdell murder but you never knew the real solution.
You have read of the Nathan murder at the corner of the Avenue and
Twenty-third Street. But you did not hear, as I heard, that piercing
wail, or see the shaking figure that climbed on my rear step at
Twenty-fourth Street and rode twenty blocks northward. A man once wrote
an Australian story called 'The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.' My life had
not one mystery but a score of mysteries. You think you know something
of Fifth Avenue. What do you know of the killing the Girl in Green, or
of Colt and the William Street printer, the Suicides of No. X Washington
Square, North, or The Enigma of the Fifteenth Street House, or of The
Case of Giuseppe and the Italian Ambassador, which was hushed up by
orders from Washington and Rome, or The Affair of the Titled Sexton, or
The Madison Square Tower Episode?"

But I was growing weary of the voice of the old impostor.

"Ever hear of Conan Doyle?" I asked.

"Now come to think of it, a drummer from Altoona left a paper copy of
one of his books the last trip."

CHAPTER XIII

_A Post-Knickerbocker Petronius_

A Post-