he danced the old dances,
so he dances the new, to greater perfection than any man in New York.
He is gorgeously built, and has a carriage of the head, an eye and a
smile, and a way with him that can shake a man from the water wagon or
a woman from her virtue. He smokes like a factory, and drinks like a
fish, yet at a moment's notice he is ready for some great feat of
endurance--such as playing through the racket championship, or swimming
from Newport to Narragansett Pier. He might have been--anything you
please. But what can I say definitely that he _is_? Well, at this
very moment, he is co-respondent in a divorce suit which is delighting
the newspapers, and it looks as if he'd have to marry her in the end.
And that's a pity because they were tired of each other before they got
found out, and she's not the kind of woman that his friends are going
to like.

Fulton's friend Ludlow has just published the best book on the birds of
New York, past and present, that was ever written. My friend Pierson
died the other day of pneumonia. As a boy he had the constitution of
an ox, and ought to have thrown off pneumonia as I would throw off a
cold in the head, but the doctors say that he had simply burned up his
powers of resistance with overdoses of alcohol. You never saw him
drunk or off his balance or merry in any way; he simply and slowly
soaked himself till his insides were like sponges dipped in the stuff.
And Pierson's not the only man in my circle who has gone out like that;
and as they went so will others go; strong and well Saturday to the
casual eye, and dead Monday.

This is not the time to take up those great issues which have risen
between those who are tempted by drink and fall, and those who are not
tempted and don't. But I am very sure of this: that a vast majority of
the men who make the world go round drink or have drunk; and that when
at last the world comes to be governed by those who don't and haven't,
it will be even worse governed, more pettily and meddlesomely, than it
is at present. And that is saying a good deal, even for a butterfly.

You mustn't gather that Fulton and his friends were a goody-goody set
of boys. They erred and strayed from their ways at times, like the
worst of us. There was Browning for instance, a born experimenter, who
so experimented with cocktails one fine morning (at the corner of Sixth
Avenue and Forty-third Street) that he marched into Madame Castignet's
French cla