A VAGABOND IN NEW YORK My favorite pitch is the ring of bunctob
lounil the toimtnin opposite the General Post Office. EHRWARTEND
For to admire and for to see, For to beold this world so wide It
never done no good to me, But I cant stop it if I tried. Kipling.
PREFACE AT the time when some of these sketches were appearing in
the pages of Truth I received a letter from an earnest-minded
reader, enquir ing whether they were supposed to be re motely
founded on fact, or were merely the imaginative efforts of a common
or garden liar. Perhaps I should therefore preface them in their
collected form with the assurance that they are one and all founded
on fact, not over and above remotely. They are based, as they
profess to be, upon the experi ences of a young Englishman during a
period of vagabondage enjoyed in New York and thereabouts. They do
not however claim the exact fidelity to fact of Hansard or a Law Re
port. Vagabondage is a mental no less than a physical state of
being and, just as a tramps 9 Preface progress across the sunny
side of life is less direct than is, say, that of a bank-manager
through the shadows, so his mind recalls less faithfully all and
every entry in the mnemonical ledger. Perhaps then, in this
narrative some terminological inexactitude may here and there find
expression in word, or exclamation mark, or period. Here and there
memory may heighten a high-light or erase a shadow. No vagabond
could be expected to swear in a court of law to the exact size or
brilliancy of every politicians near-diamond bosom-pin which may
have cast its light across his path or his pages or that the
politician smoked exactly such a cigar as memory recalls, or indeed
that he smoked a cigarat all. Sufficient, surely, that as such the
Vagabond recalls him, as smoking, and smoking a cigar, and that the
cigar was very large and rank. Be it at least believed by the
gentlemen of the jury that such a politician there was, such a
steamboat skip per, such a policeman, such an elephant, as those
the Vagabond has sought to draw, and that their dobgs and sayings,
their relation-10 Preface ship towards him and towards each other
are recorded with as much fidelity as memory will allow. Naturally
again, they do not appear under their real names. You may walk
miles along Sixth Avenue and never find Mr. Cholmondelys laboratory
the Officer who directs the traffic at the corner of Broadway and
Union Square will not answer to the name of Dempsey may even deny
the existence of any officer answer ing to that name. Yet you may
believe with out fear of being led astray that Mr. Chol mondely,
however called, is at this moment somewhere adapting chickens to a
new career that Dempsey, whitest man who ever trod shoe leather, is
somewhere directing traffic that somewhere Gladys, unmindful of her
earlier loves, is making eyes red, piggy eyes at her mahout of the
moment. Let it not be thought that these poor sketches make any
claim to pass as Impres sions of America or that they profess to
pic ture New York, or any aspect of it, or any thing at all but the
little piece of sidewalk upon ii Preface which the Vagabonds eyes
have fallen as he quartered it in search of cigarette-ends. His not
the conquering brain, the all-seeing eye, that can compress a
nation - within the limits of a single volume, as do those Kings of
English Literature who from time to time make Royal Progresses
across the Atlantic andback for Literary purposes. No fatted calves
were ever slain for the Prodigal Vagabond no streets were ever
decorated no Fifth Avenue mansions flung open against his coming.
He has but hung upon the skirts of the cheering crowd, thankful if,
from afar off, he might catch some vague glimpse of the Features,
the Repose, of the Great Man...
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