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 gether. . . . "So darn right, too," he added, almost with bitterness.

New Year's Eve at Terrace Tavern looked, as Jock put it, "like a futuristic conception of a riot in an insane asylum," and sounded like no known thing. It fairly rocked and vibrated and teemed. It was a cyclone of color, a turmoil of motion, a pandemonium and a hullabaloo. It was Terrace Tavern at its rowdiest, and by comparison with it the average roadhouse evening seemed tranquil, staid, and placid and demure.

Reservations had been made weeks in advance. Every table bore a thicket of green and brown bottles, a flotilla of glasses, a dust of crumbs, an array of women's vanity cases, ash trays full of smoked-up ends, dishes, food under plated silver beehives. Every chair had a flushed and gibbering occupant, wearing a crepe paper hat. There were fat bald heads in blue sunbonnets, and pin-heads in green helmets, and square heads in pointed caps, and flabby pink jowls tied 'round with babyish bows. And women in rather becoming hats. Women always manage that, somehow. Vain, even in wassail.

Confetti lay on the dance floor in little parti-hued puddles, and marked trails between the tables. It flecked the dark-coated shoulders of men, and glistened in women's hair, and stuck like beauty marks to their moist warm skin. Colored streamers looped from the central chandelier, bunched about the feet of the dancers and tripped them, stacked itself in corners as though a giant ticker-tape basket had upset. A Christmas tree stood near the stage where the orchestra played,