n the bridle paths, and burrowing under the grass where the ground
was soft enough, the likes of 5,000 head of people successfully
battled against the night air in Central Park alone.

"Ye know I live in the elegant furnished apartment house called the
Beersheba Flats, over against the elevated portion of the New York
Central Railroad.

"When the order come to the flats that all hands must turn out and
sleep in the park, according to the instructions of the consulting
committee of the City Club and the Murphy Draying, Returfing and
Sodding Company, there was a look of a couple of fires and an
eviction all over the place.

"The tenants began to pack up feather beds, rubber boots, strings of
garlic, hot-water bags, portable canoes and scuttles of coal to take
along for the sake of comfort. The sidewalk looked like a Russian
camp in Oyama's line of march. There was wailing and lamenting up
and down stairs from Danny Geoghegan's flat on the top floor to the
apartments of Missis Goldsteinupski on the first.

"'For why,' says Danny, coming down and raging in his blue yarn socks
to the janitor, 'should I be turned out of me comfortable apartments
to lay in the dirty grass like a rabbit? 'Tis like Jerome to stir up
trouble wid small matters like this instead of--'

"'Whist!' says Officer Reagan on the sidewalk, rapping with his club.
''Tis not Jerome. 'Tis by order of the Polis Commissioner. Turn out
every one of yez and hike yerselves to the park.'

"Now, 'twas a peaceful and happy home that all of us had in them same
Beersheba Flats. The O'Dowds and the Steinowitzes and the Callahans
and the Cohens and the Spizzinellis and the McManuses and the
Spiegelmayers and the Joneses--all nations of us, we lived like one
big family together. And when the hot nights come along we kept a
line of children reaching from the front door to Kelly's on the
corner passing along the cans of beer from one to another without the
trouble of running after it. And with no more clothing on than is
provided for in the statutes, sitting in all the windies, with a
cool growler in every one, and your feet out in the air, and the
Rosenstein girls singing on the fire-escape of the sixth floor, and
Patsy Rourke's flute going in the eighth, and the ladies calling each
other synonyms out the windie, and now and then a breeze sailing in
over Mister Depew's Central--I tell you the Beersheba Flats was a
summer resort that made the Catskills look like a hol