I was unable to find it.
I took it up to my room and spread it out on the bed and went over it,
column by column. Something was wrong.

Three hours afterward the postman brought me a large envelope
containing my MS. and a piece of inexpensive paper, about 3 inches by
4--I suppose some of you have seen them--upon which was written in
violet ink, "With the _Sun's_ thanks."

I went over to the square and sat upon a bench. No; I did not think it
necessary to eat any breakfast that morning. The confounded pests of
sparrows were making the square hideous with their idiotic "cheep,
cheep." I never saw birds so persistently noisy, impudent, and
disagreeable in all my life.

By this time, according to all traditions, I should have been standing
in the office of the editor of the _Sun_. That personage--a tall,
grave, white-haired man--would strike a silver bell as he grasped my
hand and wiped a suspicious moisture from his glasses.

"Mr. McChesney," he would be saying when a subordinate appeared, "this
is Mr. Henry, the young man who sent in that exquisite gem about the
sparrows in Madison Square. You may give him a desk at once. Your
salary, sir, will be $80 a week, to begin with."

This was what I had been led to expect by all writers who have evolved
romances of literary New York.

Something was decidedly wrong with tradition. I could not assume the
blame, so I fixed it upon the sparrows. I began to hate them with
intensity and heat.

At that moment an individual wearing an excess of whiskers, two hats,
and a pestilential air slid into the seat beside me.

"Say, Willie," he muttered cajolingly, "could you cough up a dime out
of your coffers for a cup of coffee this morning?"

"I'm lung-weary, my friend," said I. "The best I can do is three
cents."

"And you look like a gentleman, too," said he. "What brung you
down?--boozer?"

"Birds," I said fiercely. "The brown-throated songsters carolling
songs of hope and cheer to weary man toiling amid the city's dust and
din. The little feathered couriers from the meadows and woods chirping
sweetly to us of blue skies and flowering fields. The confounded
little squint-eyed nuisances yawping like a flock of steam pianos, and
stuffing themselves like aldermen with grass seeds and bugs, while a
man sits on a bench and goes without his breakfast. Yes, sir, birds!
look at them!"

As I spoke I picked up a dead tree branch that lay by the bench, and
hurled it wit