y of May us three divided about $6,000.]

"Boys," says she, dabbing her eyes with a little handkerchief, "this
stake comes in handier than a powder rag at a fat men's ball. It gives
me a chance to reform. I was trying to get out of the real estate
business when you fellows came along. But if you hadn't taken me in on
this neat little proposition for removing the cuticle of the rutabaga
propagators I'm afraid I'd have got into something worse. I was about
to accept a place in one of these Women's Auxiliary Bazars, where
they build a parsonage by selling a spoonful of chicken salad and a
cream-puff for seventy-five cents and calling it a Business Man's Lunch.

"Now I can go into a square, honest business, and give all them queer
jobs the shake. I'm going to Cincinnati and start a palm reading and
clairvoyant joint. As Madame Saramaloi, the Egyptian Sorceress, I
shall give everybody a dollar's worth of good honest prognostication.
Good-by, boys. Take my advice and go into some decent fake. Get
friendly with the police and newspapers and you'll be all right."

So then we all shook hands, and Miss Malloy left us. Me and Buck also
rose up and sauntered off a few hundred miles; for we didn't care to
be around when them marriage certificates fell due.

With about $4,000 between us we hit that bumptious little town off the
New Jersey coast they call New York.

If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that
Yaptown-on-the-Hudson. Cosmopolitan they call it. You bet. So's a piece
of fly-paper. You listen close when they're buzzing and trying to pull
their feet out of the sticky stuff. "Little old New York's good enough
for us"--that's what they sing.

There's enough Reubs walk down Broadway in one hour to buy up a
week's output of the factory in Augusta, Maine, that makes Knaughty
Knovelties and the little Phine Phun oroide gold finger ring that
sticks a needle in your friend's hand.

You'd think New York people was all wise; but no. They don't get a
chance to learn. Everything's too compressed. Even the hayseeds are
baled hayseeds. But what else can you expect from a town that's shut
off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the
other?

It's no place for an honest grafter with a small capital. There's too
big a protective tariff on bunco. Even when Giovanni sells a quart
of warm worms and chestnut hulls he has to hand out a pint to an
insectivorous cop. And the hotel man charges double