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 light car outside. I suppose, since you’ve been converted to the town, that your idea of rural sport is to have a little whirl between bicycle cops in Central Park and then a mug of sticky ale in some stuffy rathskeller under a fan that can’t stir up as many revolutions in a week as Nicaragua can in a day.”

“We’ll begin with the spin through the Park, anyhow,” I said. I was choking with the hot, stale air of my little apartment, and I wanted that breath of the cool to brace me for the task of proving to my friend that New York was the greatest—and so forth.

“Where can you find air any fresher or purer than this?” I asked, as we sped into Central’s boskiest dell.

“Air!” said North, contemptuously. “Do you call this air?—this muggy vapor, smelling of garbage and gasoline smoke. Man, I wish you could get one sniff of the real Adirondack article in the pine woods at daylight.”

“I have heard of it,” said I. “But for fragrance and tang and a joy in the nostrils I would not give one puff of sea breeze across the bay, down on my little boat dock on Long Island, for ten of your turpentine-scented tornadoes.” Rh