m with the label of any section."

"Pardon me," I said, "but my curiosity was not altogether an idle one.
I know the South, and when the band plays 'Dixie' I like to observe. I
have formed the belief that the man who applauds that air with special
violence and ostensible sectional loyalty is invariably a native of
either Secaucus, N.J., or the district between Murray Hill Lyceum and
the Harlem River, this city. I was about to put my opinion to the
test by inquiring of this gentleman when you interrupted with your
own--larger theory, I must confess."

And now the dark-haired young man spoke to me, and it became evident
that his mind also moved along its own set of grooves.

"I should like to be a periwinkle," said he, mysteriously, "on the top
of a valley, and sing tooralloo-ralloo."

This was clearly too obscure, so I turned again to Coglan.

"I've been around the world twelve times," said he. "I know an Esquimau
in Upernavik who sends to Cincinnati for his neckties, and I saw a
goat-herder in Uruguay who won a prize in a Battle Creek breakfast food
puzzle competition. I pay rent on a room in Cairo, Egypt, and another
in Yokohama all the year around. I've got slippers waiting for me in a
tea-house in Shanghai, and I don't have to tell 'em how to cook my eggs
in Rio de Janeiro or Seattle. It's a mighty little old world. What's the
use of bragging about being from the North, or the South, or the old
manor house in the dale, or Euclid avenue, Cleveland, or Pike's Peak, or
Fairfax County, Va., or Hooligan's Flats or any place? It'll be a better
world when we quit being fools about some mildewed town or ten acres of
swampland just because we happened to be born there."

"You seem to be a genuine cosmopolite," I said admiringly. "But it also
seems that you would decry patriotism."

"A relic of the stone age," declared Coglan, warmly. "We are all
brothers--Chinamen, Englishmen, Zulus, Patagonians and the people in the
bend of the Kaw River. Some day all this petty pride in one's city or
State or section or country will be wiped out, and we'll all be citizens
of the world, as we ought to be."

"But while you are wandering in foreign lands," I persisted, "do not
your thoughts revert to some spot--some dear and--"

"Nary a spot," interrupted E. R. Coglan, flippantly. "The terrestrial,
globular, planetary hunk of matter, slightly flattened at the poles, and
known as the Earth, is my abode. I've met a good many object-boun