e than any you can find on Broadway. Since
my brief sojourn there last year I have decided that our people before
going to New York should see America first."

"Now what do you think of that?" demanded the lady. I said I would be
able to think little of it unless I were told the precise reasons for
this rather brutal abuse of a great city. What, indeed, were the "many
reasons" that Mr. Sutton had grimly not confided to ye scribe?

Ma Pettengill chuckled and reread parts of the indictment. Thereafter
she again chuckled fluently and uttered broken phrases to herself.
"Horse-car" was one; "the only born New Yorker alive" was another. It
became necessary for me to remind the woman that a guest was present. I
did this by shifting my chair to face the stone fireplace in which a
pine chunk glowed, and by coughing in a delicate and expectant manner.

"Poor Ben!" she murmured--"going all the day down there just to get one
romantic look at his old home after being gone twenty-five years. I
don't blame him for talking rough about the town, nor for his criminal
act--stealing a street-car track."

It sounded piquant--a noble theft indeed! I now murmured a bit myself,
striving to convey an active incredulity that yet might be vanquished by
facts. The lady quite ignored this, diverging to her own opinion of New
York. She tore the wrapper from a Sunday issue of a famous metropolitan
daily and flaunted its comic supplement at me. "That's how I always
think of New York," said she--"a kind of a comic supplement to the rest
of this great country. Here--see these two comical little tots standing
on their uncle's stomach and chopping his heart out with their
axes--after you got the town sized up it's just that funny and horrible.
It's like the music I heard that time at a higher concert I was drug to
in Boston--ingenious but unpleasant."

But this was not what I would sit up for after a hard day's
fishing--this coarse disparagement of something the poor creature was
unfitted to comprehend.

"Ben Sutton," I remarked firmly.

* * * * *

"The inhabitants of New York are divided fifty-fifty between them that
are trying to get what you got and them that think you're trying to get
what they got."

"Ben Sutton," I repeated, trying to make it sullen.

"Ask a man on the street in New York where such and such a building is
and he'll edge out of reaching distance, with his hand on his watch,
before he tells yo