tion about a Tennessee mica mine that I wanted to spread
out in a nice, sunny window, in the hopes of catching a few. I was
coming out of a printing-shop one afternoon with a batch of fine,
sticky prospectuses when I ran against Denver coming round a corner.
I never saw him looking so much like a tiger-lily. He was as
beautiful and new as a trellis of sweet peas, and as rollicking as
a clarinet solo. We shook hands, and he asked me what I was doing,
and I gave him the outlines of the scandal I was trying to create in
mica.

"'Pooh, pooh! for your mica,' says Denver. 'Don't you know better,
Sully, than to bump up against the coffers of little old New York
with anything as transparent as mica? Now, you come with me over to
the Hotel Brunswick. You're just the man I was hoping for. I've got
something there in sepia and curled hair that I want you to look
at.'

"'You putting up at the Brunswick?' I asks.

"'Not a cent,' says Denver, cheerful. 'The syndicate that owns the
hotel puts up. I'm manager.'

"The Brunswick wasn't one of them Broadway pot-houses all full of
palms and hyphens and flowers and costumes--kind of a mixture of
lawns and laundries. It was on one of the East Side avenues; but it
was a solid, old-time caravansary such as the Mayor of Skaneateles
or the Governor of Missouri might stop at. Eight stories high it
stalked up, with new striped awnings, and the electrics had it as
light as day.

"'I've been manager here for a year,' says Denver, as we drew nigh.
'When I took charge,' says he, 'nobody nor nothing ever stopped at
the Brunswick. The clock over the clerks' desk used to run for weeks
without winding. A man fell dead with heart-disease on the sidewalk
in front of it one day, and when they went to pick him up he was two
blocks away. I figured out a scheme to catch the West Indies and
South American trade. I persuaded the owners to invest a few more
thousands, and I put every cent of it in electric lights, cayenne
pepper, gold-leaf, and garlic. I got a Spanish-speaking force of
employees and a string band; and there was talk going round of a
cockfight in the basement every Sunday. Maybe I didn't catch the
nut-brown gang! From Havana to Patagonia the Don Senors knew about
the Brunswick. We get the highfliers from Cuba and Mexico and the
couple of Americas farther south; and they've simply got the boodle
to bombard every bulfinch in the bush with.'

"When we got to the hotel, Denver stops me at the