rize in sewing on
graduation day.

Grandma is holding to the comic supplement with a two-hours' grip; and
little Tottie, the baby, is rocking along the best she can with the real
estate transfers. This view is intended to be reassuring, for it is
desirable that a few lines of this story be skipped. For it introduces
strong drink.

I went into a cafe to--and while it was being mixed I asked the man
who grabs up your hot Scotch spoon as soon as you lay it down what
he understood by the term, epithet, description, designation,
characterisation or appellation, viz.: a "Man About Town."

"Why," said he, carefully, "it means a fly guy that's wise to the
all-night push--see? It's a hot sport that you can't bump to the rail
anywhere between the Flatirons--see? I guess that's about what it
means."

I thanked him and departed.

On the sidewalk a Salvation lassie shook her contribution receptacle
gently against my waistcoat pocket.

"Would you mind telling me," I asked her, "if you ever meet with the
character commonly denominated as 'A Man About Town' during your daily
wanderings?"

"I think I know whom you mean," she answered, with a gentle smile. "We
see them in the same places night after night. They are the devil's body
guard, and if the soldiers of any army are as faithful as they are,
their commanders are well served. We go among them, diverting a few
pennies from their wickedness to the Lord's service."

She shook the box again and I dropped a dime into it.

In front of a glittering hotel a friend of mine, a critic, was climbing
from a cab. He seemed at leisure; and I put my question to him. He
answered me conscientiously, as I was sure he would.

"There is a type of 'Man About Town' in New York," he answered. "The
term is quite familiar to me, but I don't think I was ever called upon
to define the character before. It would be difficult to point you out
an exact specimen. I would say, offhand, that it is a man who had a
hopeless case of the peculiar New York disease of wanting to see and
know. At 6 o'clock each day life begins with him. He follows rigidly the
conventions of dress and manners; but in the business of poking his nose
into places where he does not belong he could give pointers to a civet
cat or a jackdaw. He is the man who has chased Bohemia about the town
from rathskeller to roof garden and from Hester street to Harlem until
you can't find a place in the city where they don't cut their spaghetti