who stood in front of an extremely vacant
looking cafe. He had a watch-chain with massive gold links and an
enormous obsolete gold coin depending from his coat lapel. His boots
were shiny and globular of toe, and I gathered, as the day wore on, that
he represented Occidental Prosperity in that simple community and was
charitably excused from such glaring solecisms on that ground. They
found no fault with him for having an adventurous spirit which had
carried him to the Country of the Mad beyond the sea, for he had shown
his ultimate wisdom by coming back to live in a civilized part of the
world. In fact, by the way they drifted in during the afternoon and sat
at adjacent tables while he held forth bilingually upon his experiences
in a Hoboken sewer, it was evident that in addition to being a stout
burgess of the township, he was a species of Sinbad to them, with
preposterous but intriguing stories of subterranean cities where vast
and brilliant chariots roared through interminable passages; of
heaven-scaling towers where myriads fought for silks and jewels, for
gold and silver, for purple and fine linen; of streets above which
insane railway trains hurtled and shrieked and groaned as they carried
the demented inhabitants on endless journeys to nowhere in particular
for no ascertainable reasons. For mind you, they displayed no desire
whatever to emulate the daring feats of those who had gone to America.
They sat there for a time, smoking _narghilehs_ or cigarettes, looking
thoughtfully at the floor between their outlandish shoes, and then
drifted away to attend, it is to be presumed, to various affairs. I
doubt whether my confirmation of these improbabilities was of much avail
in convincing them that he was not simply exercising the ancient rights
of the teller of tales, and striving to terrify them with stories of
genii in bottles and carpets that flew through the air. And he certainly
had no intention of going back. He had 'enough mon' now,' he remarked,
'and who but a lunatic would ever venture into such a pandemonium save
for the purpose of getting 'mon'.' The bare idea of living permanently
in that country and exposing one's soul to the destructive action of
their peculiar political ideas had never entered his head. They had
called him 'a crazy mutt' because, forsooth, he had quit when his belt
was sufficiently loaded with 'mon'. Now why should they do that? Why
should he go on living in hell when he had the price of