f April--nearly six years to a day from the time he had left his
native land.

He discovered a New York almost wholly new--an experience almost
inevitable, if one insists on absenting one's self even for as little as
half a decade. Intimations of immense changes were borne in upon
Whitaker while the steamer worked up the Bay. The Singer Building was an
unfamiliar sky-mark, but not more so than the Metropolitan Tower and the
Woolworth. The _Olympic_ docked at an impressive steel-and-concrete
structure, new since his day; and Whitaker narrowly escaped a row with a
taxicab chauffeur because the fellow smiled impertinently when directed
to drive to the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

A very few hours added amazingly to the catalogue of things that were
not as they had been: a list so extensive and impressive that he made up
his mind to maintain his incognito for a few days, until familiar with
the ways of his home. He was quick to perceive that he would even have
to forget most of the slang that had been current in his time, in
addition to unlearning all he had picked up abroad, and set himself with
attentive ears pricked forward and an open mind to master the new,
strange tongue his countrymen were speaking, if he were to make himself
intelligible to them--and them to him, for that matter.

So he put up at the Ritz-Carlton, precisely as any foreigner might be
expected to do, and remained Hugh Morten while he prowled around the
city and found himself. Now and again in the course of his wanderings he
encountered well-remembered faces, but always without eliciting the
slightest gleam of recognition: circumstances that only went to prove
how thoroughly dead and buried he was in the estimation of his day and
generation.

Nothing, indeed, seemed as he remembered it except the offerings in the
theatres. He sat through plays on three successive nights that sent him
back to his hotel saddened by the conviction that the tastes of his
fellow-countrymen in the matter of amusements were as enduring as
adamant--as long-enduring. Some day (he prophesied) New York would be
finished and complete; then would come the final change--its
name--because it wouldn't be New York unless ever changing; and when
that was settled, the city would know ease and, for want of something
less material to occupy it, begin to develop a soul of its own--together
with an inclination for something different in the way of theatrical
entertainment.

But his ultimate an