Page:The New Yorker 0004, 1925-03-14.pdf/19



"We-ell, that's not so bad, comparatively. We might take a chance."

sandwich man with the "no speculators' I tickets accepted" at the Palace in the middle of the scalping zone. The Greenwich Village Inn, filled with Columbia students from One Hundred and Sixteenth Street. Gray's drug store, meeting place for six million people. Petting parties at Inspiration Point crowded more thickly than the after-theatre jam at Times Square.

The pretty cigarette girl at the Parody Club. Coney Island and Chinatown for fifty cents. Ice cream soda dissipations at the McAlpin. Sailors having the time of their lives on the Park Place escalator. Filling stations built in imitation of English village architecture. The something-hundredth-and-somethingth performance of "Abie's Irish Rose." Hard-boiled Broadwayites shedding tears over the latest sentimental song wafted from the windows of Tin Pan Alley.

Spats, cutaways and Pomeranians on Park Avenue. Fat ladies leaning on window sills near the New York Central tracks. Take the kiddies a Zeppelin balloon fer fifteen cents. The one-legged pencil-seller in the Fourteenth Street subway entrance. Visitors from Lansing, Michigan, who inspect Grant's Tomb once a year.

Perpetual auction sales along Broadway in the Forties. Fifth Avenue busmen wearing name plates. Marion Davies's pictures "reviewed" in the Hearst newspapers. Orange drink stands selling hot dogs. The Clicquot sign at Forty-third Street. Crossword puzzlists in the Interborough. Malt and hops stores, or what have you? The white-haired, young-faced information girl at the Commodore. The man who lives at the Astor and subscribes to The American Mercury, The Country Gentleman and Snappy Stories. The tragic figure who mistook the 1 A. M. South Ferry train for the Flatbush express. —T. H. B.

Fiction—An instalment 'of a novel with wide popular appeal, and a true short story-every day.

—From a prospectus of the Daily Mirror.

Would I could journey to some lone grot In a far Samoan vacant lot. Would I could hie to some Iceland floe Known only to unread Esquimaux. For I want (have you any furnished nooks?) To travel where there are no travel books.

Item: "Late steamer arrivals are Ida Gemish and Ffolliott Carr." The point of which is, devoid of trimmin': The late ones are, as usual, women.