ay for all of us, though I got my shopping started, and
at night we met at the hotel and had a lonesome dinner. We was all too
dazed and tired to feel like larking about any, and poor Ben was so
downright depressed it was pathetic. Ever read the story about a man
going to sleep and waking up in a glass case in a museum a thousand
years later? That was Ben coming back to his old town after only
twenty-five years. He hadn't been able to find a single old friend nor
any familiar faces. He ordered a porterhouse steak, family style, for
himself, but he was so mournful he couldn't eat more than about two
dollars' worth of it. He kept forgetting himself in dismal
reminiscences. The onlysright thing he'd found was the men tearing up
the streets. That was just like they used to be, he said. He maundered
on to us about how horse-cars was running on Broadway when he left and
how they hardly bothered to light the lamps north of Forty-second
Street, and he wished he could have some fish balls like the old
Sinclair House used to have for its free lunch, and how in them golden
days people that had been born right here in New York was seen so
frequently that they created no sensation.

He was feeling awful desolate about this. He pointed out different
parties at tables around us, saying they was merchant princes from
Sandusky or prominent Elks from Omaha or roystering blades from
Pittsburgh or boulevardeers from Bucyrus--not a New Yorker in sight. He
said he'd been reading where a wealthy nut had seat out an expedition to
the North Pole to capture a certain kind of Arctic flea that haunts only
a certain rare fox--but he'd bet a born New Yorker was harder to find.
He said what this millionaire defective ought to of done with his
inherited wealth was to find a male and female born here and have 'em
stuffed and mounted under glass in a fire-proof museum, which would be a
far more exciting spectacle than any flea on earth, however scarce and
arctic. He said he'd asked at least forty men that day where they was
born--waiters, taxi-drivers, hotel clerks, bartenders, and just anybody
that would stop and take one with him, and not a soul had been born
nearer to the old town than Scranton, Pennsylvania. "It's
heart-rending," he says, "to reflect that I'm alone here in this big
city of outlanders. I haven't even had the nerve to go down to West
Ninth Street for a look at the old home that shelters my boyhood
memories. If I could find only one bo