ed when I hear them two
rings--was it the baseball score or gin fizz you asked for?"

"Ginger ale," I answered.

I walked up to Broadway. I saw a cop on the corner. The cops take
kids up, women across, and men in. I went up to him.

"If I'm not exceeding the spiel limit," I said, "let me ask you. You
see New York during its vocative hours. It is the function of you and
your brother cops to preserve the acoustics of the city. There must
be a civic voice that is intelligible to you. At night during your
lonely rounds you must have heard it. What is the epitome of its
turmoil and shouting? What does the city say to you?"

"Friend," said the policeman, spinning his club, "it don't say
nothing. I get my orders from the man higher up. Say, I guess you're
all right. Stand here for a few minutes and keep an eye open for the
roundsman."

The cop melted into the darkness of the side street. In ten minutes
he had returned.

"Married last Tuesday," he said, half gruffly. "You know how they
are. She comes to that corner at nine every night for a--comes to say
'hello!' I generally manage to be there. Say, what was it you asked
me a bit ago--what's doing in the city? Oh, there's a roof-garden or
two just opened, twelve blocks up."

I crossed a crow's-foot of street-car tracks, and skirted the edge
of an umbrageous park. An artificial Diana, gilded, heroic, poised,
wind-ruled, on the tower, shimmered in the clear light of her
namesake in the sky. Along came my poet, hurrying, hatted, haired,
emitting dactyls, spondees and dactylis. I seized him.

"Bill," said I (in the magazine he is Cleon), "give me a lift. I am
on an assignment to find out the Voice of the city. You see, it's a
special order. Ordinarily a symposium comprising the views of Henry
Clews, John L. Sullivan, Edwin Markham, May Irwin and Charles Schwab
would be about all. But this is a different matter. We want a broad,
poetic, mystic vocalization of the city's soul and meaning. You are
the very chap to give me a hint. Some years ago a man got at the
Niagara Falls and gave us its pitch. The note was about two feet
below the lowest G on the piano. Now, you can't put New York into a
note unless it's better indorsed than that. But give me an idea of
what it would say if it should speak. It is bound to be a mighty and
far-reaching utterance. To arrive at it we must take the tremendous
crash of the chords of the day's traffic, the laughter and music
of the night, the