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hand and wiped a suspicious moisture from his glasses.

“Mr. McChesney,” he would be saying when a subordinate appeared, “this is Mr. Henry, the young man who sent in that exquisite gem about the sparrows in Madison Square. You may give him a desk at once. Your salary, sir, will be $80 a week, to begin with.”

This was what I had been led to expect by all writers who have evolved romances of literary New York.

Something was decidedly wrong with tradition. I could not assume the blame; so I fixed it upon the sparrows. I began to hate them with intensity and heat.

At that moment an individual wearing an excess of whiskers, two hats, and a pestilential air slid into the seat beside me.

“Say, Willie,” he muttered cajolingly, “could you cough up a dime out of your coffers for a cup of coffee this morning?”

“I’m lung-weary, my friend,” said I. “The best I can do is three cents.”

“And you look like a gentleman, too,” said he. “What brung you down—booze?”

“Birds,” I said fiercely. “The brown-throated songsters carolling songs of hope and cheer to weary man toiling amid the city’s dust and din. The little feathered couriers from the meadows and woods chirping sweetly to us of blue skies and flowering