ugh I
am the person sitting in the second row down front who applauds until
the flooring gives way and the plastering is jarred loose on the next
floor. She can sing for me by the hour and I'll sit there by the hour
and listen to her, and forget that there ever was such a person in the
whole world as the late Vogner! That's the kind of a music-lover I am,
and I suspect, if the truth were known, there are a whole lot more just
like me.

If I may be excused for getting sort of personal and reminiscent at this
point I should like to make brief mention here of the finest music I
ever heard. As it happened this was instrumental music. I had come to
New York with a view to revolutionizing metropolitan journalism, and
journalism had shown a reluctance amounting to positive diffidence about
coming forward and being revolutionized. Pending the time when it should
see fit to do so, I was stopping at a boarding house on West
Fifty-Seventh Street. It has been my observation that practically
everybody who comes to New York stops for a while in a boarding house on
West Fifty-Seventh Street.

West Fifty-Seventh Street was where I was established, in a hall bedroom
on the top floor--a hall bedroom so form-fitting and cozy that when I
went to bed I always opened the transom to prevent a feeling of
closeness across the chest. If I had as many as three callers in my room
of an evening and one of them got up to go first, the others had to sit
quietly while he was picking out his own legs. But up to the time I
speak of I hadn't had any callers. I hadn't been there very long and I
hadn't met any of the other boarders socially, except at the table. I
had only what you might call a feeding acquaintance with them.

Christmas Eve came round. I was a thousand miles from home and felt a
million. I shouldn't be surprised if I was a little bit homesick. Anyhow
it was Christmas Eve, and it was snowing outside according to the
orthodox Christmas Eve formula, and upward of five million other people
in New York were getting ready for Christmas without my company,
co-operation or assistance. You'd be surprised to know how lonesome you
can feel in the midst of five million people--until you try it on a
Christmas Eve.

After dinner I went up to my room and sat down with my back against the
door and my feet on the window-ledge, and I rested one elbow in the
washpitcher and put one knee on the mantel and tried to read the
newspapers. The first thing I s