ions, he set out clean paper, cleansed his
fountain pen, and stared at the ceiling. What should he write about? His
mental retina teemed with impressions. But they were confused,
unresolved, distorted for all that he knew, since he lacked experience
and knowledge of the environment, and therefore perspective. Groping, he
recalled a saying of Gardner's as that wearied enthusiast descanted upon
the glories of past great names in metropolitan journalism.

"They used to say of Julian Ralph that he was always discovering City
Hall Park and getting excited over it; and when he got excited enough,
he wrote about it so that the public just ate it up."

Well, he, Banneker, hadn't discovered City Hall Park; not consciously.
But he had gleaned wonder and delight from other and more remote spots,
and now one of them began to stand forth upon the blank ceiling at which
he stared, seeking guidance. A crowded corner of Essex Street, stewing
in the hard sunshine. The teeming, shrill crowd. The stench and gleam of
a fish-stall offering bargains. The eager games of the children,
snatched between onsets of imminent peril as cart or truck came whirling
through and scattering the players. Finally the episode of the trade
fracas over the remains of a small and dubious weakfish, terminating
when the dissatisfied customer cast the delicacy at the head of the
stall-man and missed him, the _corpus delicti_ falling into the gutter
where it was at once appropriated and rapt away by an incredulous,
delighted, and mangy cat. A crude, commonplace, malodorous little street
row, the sort of thing that happens, in varying phases, on a dozen
East-Side corners seven days in the week.

Banneker approached and treated the matter from the viewpoint of the
cat, predatory, philosophic, ecstatic. One o'clock in the morning saw
the final revision, for he had become enthralled with the handling of
his subject. It was only a scant five pages; less than a thousand words.
But as he wrote and rewrote, other schemata rose to the surface of his
consciousness, and he made brief notes of them on random ends of paper;
half a dozen of them, one crowding upon another. Some day, perhaps, when
there were enough of them, when he had become known, had achieved the
distinction of a signature like Gardner, there might be a real
series.... His vague expectancies were dimmed in weariness.

Such was the genesis of the "Local Vagrancies" which later were to set
Park Row speculatin