ed by my person.

"Whiplash win in the fi'th," he volunteered presently.

"Yes?" said I with a polite but spurious show of interest.

"Under a pull. Spread-eagled his field."

"Who is Whiplash, may I ask?"

"Oh, Gaw!" said the pink man, appalled. He searched my face
suspiciously. "A hoss," he stated at length, satisfied of my ignorance.

After several reflective puffs, the smoke of which insufficiently veiled
his furtive appraisal of myself, he tried again:

"They give O'Dowd a shade, last night."

"Indeed? Who did?"

"The sporting writers."

"As a testimonial?" I inquired, adding that a shade, whether of the lamp
or sun species seemed an unusual sort of gift.

My interlocutor groaned. He drew from the pocket of his gray-check
cutaway, purple and fine linen, the purple being an ornate and
indecipherable monogram, wherewith to wipe his troubled brow. Susan
Gluck's Orphan, who was playing down-wind, paused to inhale deeply and
with a beatific expression. Restoring the fragrant square to its
repository, the pink one essayed another conversational skirmish.

"The Reds copped again yesterday."

"If you are referring to the raid on Anarchist Headquarters in Avenue C,
I should have inferred that the Reds _were_ copped, to use your term."

Curt and contemptuous laughter was his response. "Don't you ever read
the papers, down here?"

"Certainly," I retorted with some spirit, for the implied slur upon Our
Square stung me. "In fact, I was reading one of our local publications
when you inter--when you arrived. It contains some very
interesting poetry."

"Yeh?" said the hard, pink man politely.

"For example, in this issue I find the following apostrophe." I
proceeded to read aloud:

"Farewell, our dear one, we must part,
For thou hast gone to heavenly home,
While we below with aching heart
Must long for thee and ever moan."

"Swell stuff," commented the sharer of my bench, with determined
interest. "Poetry's a little out of my line, but I'm _for_ it. Who
wrote that?"

"It is signed 'Loving Father and 3 Sisters.' But the actual authorship
rests with the long gentleman in black whom you see leaning on the park
fence yonder. His name is Bartholomew Storrs and he is the elegiac or
mortuary or memorial laureate of Our Square."

This was said with intent to mortify the soul of my new acquaintance in
revenge for his previous display of erudition. The bewilderment in his
face told me that I had scored h