ich we perceived would gratify him, and he went on. "They
put up at our hotels which in the 'anguish of the solstice' they find
invitingly vacant. As soon as they have registered the clerk recognizes
them as Colonel, or Major, or Judge, but gives them the rooms which no
amount of family or social prestige could command in the season, and
there they stay, waking each day from unmosquitoed nights to iced-melon
mornings, until a greater anguish is telegraphed forward by the
Associated Press. Then they turn their keys in their doors, and flit to
the neighboring Atlantic or the adjacent Catskills, till the solstice
recovers a little, and then they return to their hotel and resume their
life in the city, which they have almost to themselves, with its parks
and drives and roof-gardens and vaudevilles, unelbowed by the three or
four millions of natives whom we leave behind us when we go to Europe,
or Newport, or Bar Harbor, or the Adirondacks. Sometimes they take
furnished flats along the Park, and settle into a greater permanency
than their hotel sojourn implies. They get the flats at about half the
rent paid by the lessees who sublet them, but I call it pathetic that
they should count it joy to come where we should think it misery to
stay. Still, everything is comparative, and I suppose they are as
reasonably happy in New York as I am in my London lodgings in the London
season, where I sometimes stifle in a heat not so pure and clear as that
I have fled from."

"Very well," we said, dryly, "you have established the fact that the
Southerners come here for the summer and live in great luxury; but what
has that to do with the cheapness of living in New York, which you began
by boasting?"

"Ah, I was coming back to that," the Howadji said, with a glow of
inspiration. "I have been imagining, in the relation which you do not
see, that New York can be made the inexpensive exile of its own children
as it has been made the summer home of those sympathetic Southerners. If
I can establish the fact of its potential cheapness, as I think I can, I
shall deprive them of some reasons for going abroad, though I'm not sure
they will thank me, when the reasons for Europe are growing fewer and
fewer. Culture can now be acquired almost as advantageously here as
there. Except for the 'monuments,' in which we include all ancient and
modern masterpieces in the several arts, we have no excuse for going to
Europe, and even in these masterpieces Europ