I never could quite understand how Tom Hopkins came to make that blunder, for he had been through a whole term at a medical college — before he inherited his aunt’s fortune — and had been considered strong in therapeutics. We had been making a call together that evening, and afterward Tom ran up to […]

The burglar stepped inside the window quickly, and then he took his time. A burglar who respects his art always takes his time before taking anything else. The house was a private residence. By its boarded front door and untrimmed Boston ivy the burglar knew that the mistress of it was sitting on some oceanside […]

If you should speak of the Kiowa Reservation to the average New Yorker he probably wouldn’t know whether you were referring to a new political dodge at Albany or a leitmotif from “Parsifal.” But out in the Kiowa Reservation advices have been received concerning the existence of New York. A party of us were on […]

[Note. The man who told me these things was for several years an outlaw in the Southwest and a follower of the pursuit he so frankly describes. His description of the modus operandi should prove interesting, his counsel of value to the potential passenger in some future “hold-up,” while his estimate of the pleasures of […]

Do you know the time of the dogmen? When the forefinger of twilight begins to smudge the clear-drawn lines of the Big City there is inaugurated an hour devoted to one of the most melancholy sights of urban life. Out from the towering flat crags and apartment peaks of the cliff dwellers of New York […]

Miss Martha Meacham kept the little bakery on the corner (the one where you go up three steps, and the bell tinkles when you open the door). Miss Martha was forty, her bank-book showed a credit of two thousand dollars, and she possessed two false teeth and a sympathetic heart. Many people have married whose […]

Said Mr. Kipling, “The cities are full of pride, challenging each to each.” Even so. New York was empty. Two hundred thousand of its people were away for the summer. Three million eight hundred thousand remained as caretakers and to pay the bills of the absentees. But the two hundred thousand are an expensive lot. […]

Inexorably Sam Galloway saddled his pony. He was going away from the Rancho Altito at the end of a three-months’ visit. It is not to be expected that a guest should put up with wheat coffee and biscuits yellow-streaked with saleratus for longer than that. Nick Napoleon, the big Negro man cook, had never been […]

In The Big City a man will disappear with the suddenness and completeness of the flame of a candle that is blown out. All the agencies of inquisition — the hounds of the trail, the sleuths of the city’s labyrinths, the closet detectives of theory and induction — will be invoked to the search. Most […]

Finch keeps a hats-cleaned-by-electricity-while-you-wait establishment, nine feet by twelve, in Third Avenue. Once a customer, you are always his. I do not know his secret process, but every four days your hat needs to be cleaned again. Finch is a leathern, sallow, slowfooted man, between twenty and forty. You would say he had been brought […]

These are the directions for finding the I office of Carteret & Carteret, Mill Supplies and Leather Belting: You follow the Broadway trail down until you pass the Crosstown Line, the Bread Line, and the Dead Line, and come to the Big Canons of the Moneygrubber Tribe. Then you turn to the left, to the […]

I Old Jerome Warren lived in a hundred-thousand-dollar house at 35 East Fifty-Soforth Street. He was a down-town broker, so rich that he could afford to walk–for his health–a few blocks in the direction of his office every morning, and then call a cab. He had an adopted son, the son of an old friend […]

A lank, strong, red-faced man with a Wellington beak and small, fiery eyes tempered by flaxen lashes, sat on the station platform at Los Pinos swinging his legs to and fro. At his side sat another man, fat, melancholy, and seedy, who seemed to be his friend. They had the appearance of men to whom […]

The (so-called) Vallambrosa Apartment-House is not an apartment-house. It is composed of two old-fashioned, brownstone-front residences welded into one. The parlor floor of one side is gay with the wraps and head-gear of a modiste; the other is lugubrious with the sophistical promises and grisly display of a painless dentist. You may have a room […]

When The Rose of Dixie magazine was started by a stock company in Toombs City, Georgia, there was never but one candidate for its chief editorial position in the minds of its owners. Col. Aquila Telfair was the man for the place. By all the rights of learning, family, reputation, and Southern traditions, he was […]

In Texas you may travel a thousand miles in a straight line. If your course is a crooked one, it is likely that both the distance and your rate of speed may be vastly increased. Clouds there sail serenely against the wind. The whip-poor-will delivers its disconsolate cry with the notes exactly reversed from those […]

On a summer’s day, while the city was rocking with the din and red uproar of patriotism, Billy Casparis told me this story. In his way, Billy is Ulysses, Jr. Like Satan, he comes from going to and fro upon the earth and walking up and down in it. To-morrow morning while you are cracking […]

In the old, old, square-porticoed mansion, with the wry window- shutters and the paint peeling off in discoloured flakes, lived one of the last war governors. The South has forgotten the enmity of the great conflict, but it refuses to abandon its old traditions and idols. In “Governor” Pemberton, as he was still fondly called, […]

But a clerk in the Cut-rate Drug Store was Samuel Tansey, yet his slender frame was a pad that enfolded the passion of Romeo, the gloom of Laura, the romance of D’Artagnan, and the desperate inspiration of Melnotte. Pity, then, that he had been denied expression, that he was doomed to the burden of utter […]

Robbins, reporter for the /Picayune/, and Dumars, of /L’Abeille/–the old French newspaper that has buzzed for nearly a century–were good friends, well proven by years of ups and downs together. They were seated where they had a habit of meeting–in the little, Creole- haunted cafe of Madame Tibault, in Dumaine Street. If you know the […]