he
train and imagining how much I should like actually to meet you and to
show you round New York."

The old man laughed in a jaunty way.

"Show _me_ round?" he said. "Why, my dear boy, _I live here_."

"I know you did long ago," I said.

"I do still," said Father Knickerbocker. "I've never left the place.
I'll show _you_ around. But wait a bit--don't carry that handbag. I'll
get a boy to call a porter to fetch a man to take it."

"Oh, I can carry it," I said. "It's a mere nothing."

"My dear fellow," said Father Knickerbocker, a little testily I thought,
"I'm as democratic and as plain and simple as any man in this city. But
when it comes to carrying a handbag in full sight of all this crowd,
why, as I said to Peter Stuyvesant about--about"--here a misty look
seemed to come over the old gentleman's face--"about two hundred years
ago, I'll be hanged if I will. It can't be done. It's not up to date."

While he was saying this, Father Knickerbocker had beckoned to a group
of porters.

"Take this gentleman's handbag," he said, "and you carry his newspapers,
and you take his umbrella. Here's a quarter for you and a quarter for
you and a quarter for you. One of you go in front and lead the way to a
taxi."

"Don't you know the way yourself?" I asked in a half-whisper.

"Of course I do, but I generally like to walk with a boy in front of me.
We all do. Only the cheap people nowadays find their own way."

Father Knickerbocker had taken my arm and was walking along in a queer,
excited fashion, senile and yet with a sort of forced youthfulness in
his gait and manner.

"Now then," he said, "get into this taxi."

"Can't we _walk_?" I asked.

"Impossible," said the old gentleman. "It's five blocks to where we are
going."

As we took our seats I looked again at my companion; this time more
closely. Father Knickerbocker he certainly was, yet somehow strangely
transformed from my pictured fancy of the Sleepy Hollow days. His
antique coat with its wide skirt had, it seemed, assumed a modish cut
as if in imitation of the bell-shaped spring overcoat of the young man
about town. His three-cornered hat was set at a rakish angle till it
looked almost like an up-to-date fedora. The great stick that he used
to carry had somehow changed itself into the curved walking-stick of a
Broadway lounger. The solid old shoes with their wide buckles were gone.
In their place he wore narrow slippers of patent leather of which he
seemed