Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/93

 spiritualists who wore their hair long; that evening, a meeting of the Association of Liquor Dealers, who had huge black mustaches, and the next day he was one of a squad of men under an old experienced reporter up across the Harlem River at work on a murder "mystery," smoking cigars with Central Office detectives and listening to the afternoon-paper men, who, in lieu of real news, made up theories for one edition which they promptly tore down in the next. That evening found him within the sombre walls of the New York Foundling Hospital, up on Lexington Avenue, asking questions of soft-voiced sisters and talking with wise young doctors about an epidemic of measles which was killing off the babies.

He liked all this. He thought it was because he was a sociologist; but it was because he was a boy. It gave him a thrill to go down into a cellar after murder-clews with a detective, just as it would any other full-blooded male. He was becoming good friends with some of these sleuths—most of whom, by the way, were not at all sleuth-like in appearance, and went about their day's