the Man Higher Up is ever found, take
my assurance for it, he will be a large, pale man with blue wristlets
showing under his cuffs, and he will be sitting to have his shoes
polished within sound of a bowling alley, and there will be somewhere
about him turquoises.

But the canvas of my imagination, when it came to limning the Man About
Town, was blank. I fancied that he bad a detachable sneer (like the
smile of the Cheshire cat) and attached cuffs; and that was all.
Whereupon I asked a newspaper reporter about him.

"Why," said he, "a 'Man About Town' something between a 'rounder' and
a 'clubman.' He isn't exactly--well, he fits in between Mrs. Fish's
receptions and private boxing bouts. He doesn't--well, he doesn't belong
either to the Lotos Club or to the Jerry McGeogheghan Galvanised Iron
Workers' Apprentices' Left Hook Chowder Association. I don't exactly
know how to describe him to you. You'll see him everywhere there's
anything doing. Yes, I suppose he's a type. Dress clothes every evening;
knows the ropes; calls every policeman and waiter in town by their first
names. No; he never travels with the hydrogen derivatives. You generally
see him alone or with another man."

My friend the reporter left me, and I wandered further afield. By this
time the 3126 electric lights on the Rialto were alight. People passed,
but they held me not. Paphian eyes rayed upon me, and left me unscathed.
Diners, heimgangers, shop-girls, confidence men, panhandlers, actors,
highwaymen, millionaires and outlanders hurried, skipped, strolled,
sneaked, swaggered and scurried by me; but I took no note of them. I
knew them all; I had read their hearts; they had served. I wanted my Man
About Town. He was a type, and to drop him would be an error--a
typograph--but no! let us continue.

Let us continue with a moral digression. To see a family reading the
Sunday paper gratifies. The sections have been separated. Papa is
earnestly scanning the page that pictures the young lady exercising
before an open window, and bending--but there, there! Mamma is
interested in trying to guess the missing letters in the word N_w Yo_k.
The oldest girls are eagerly perusing the financial reports, for a
certain young man remarked last Sunday night that he had taken a flyer
in Q., X. & Z. Willie, the eighteen-year-old son, who attends the New
York public school, is absorbed in the weekly article describing how to
make over an old skirt, for he hopes to take a p