conception of the figure that symbolized and
typified each one that he had wooed.

Chicago seemed to swoop down upon him with a breezy suggestion of
Mrs. Partington, plumes and patchouli, and to disturb his rest with
a soaring and beautiful song of future promise. But Raggles would
awake to a sense of shivering cold and a haunting impression of
ideals lost in a depressing aura of potato salad and fish.

Thus Chicago affected him. Perhaps there is a vagueness and
inaccuracy in the description; but that is Raggles's fault. He
should have recorded his sensations in magazine poems.

Pittsburg impressed him as the play of "Othello" performed in the
Russian language in a railroad station by Dockstader's minstrels.
A royal and generous lady this Pittsburg, though--homely, hearty,
with flushed face, washing the dishes in a silk dress and white kid
slippers, and bidding Raggles sit before the roaring fireplace and
drink champagne with his pigs' feet and fried potatoes.

New Orleans had simply gazed down upon him from a balcony. He could
see her pensive, starry eyes and catch the flutter of her fan, and
that was all. Only once he came face to face with her. It was at
dawn, when she was flushing the red bricks of the banquette with
a pail of water. She laughed and hummed a chansonette and filled
Raggles's shoes with ice-cold water. Allons!

Boston construed herself to the poetic Raggles in an erratic and
singular way. It seemed to him that he had drunk cold tea and that
the city was a white, cold cloth that had been bound tightly around
his brow to spur him to some unknown but tremendous mental effort.
And, after all, he came to shovel snow for a livelihood; and the
cloth, becoming wet, tightened its knots and could not be removed.

Indefinite and unintelligible ideas, you will say; but your
disapprobation should be tempered with gratitude, for these are
poets' fancies--and suppose you had come upon them in verse!

One day Raggles came and laid siege to the heart of the great city
of Manhattan. She was the greatest of all; and he wanted to learn
her note in the scale; to taste and appraise and classify and solve
and label her and arrange her with the other cities that had given
him up the secret of their individuality. And here we cease to be
Raggles's translator and become his chronicler.

Raggles landed from a ferry-boat one morning and walked into the
core of the town with the blase air of a cosmopolite. He was dresse