EWING awoke late the next morning, rejoicing that he need not cook his breakfast. After feeding his hill-born hunger with novel and exciting foods he sauntered out to become a wave on the tide that flooded those strange, heart-shaking streets. He mentally blazed his trail as he went. His soul marched to the swift and cheerful stepping of the life about him. He remembered Ben's warnings and wished that expert in urban evil could see how little menacing was this splendid procession. That the Saturday throng of shoppers and pleasure seekers was unaware of the greatness of the moment to him lent a zest of secrecy to his scouting.

Back and forth he wandered on Broadway, the moving crowds, volatile as quicksilver, holding him with a hypnotic power. Often he stopped before some shop, hotel, or theater that he had come to know in print. Not until five o'clock did he find that he was leg weary. Then he took his bearings and, in his own phrase, "made back to camp."

A boy brought him Piersoll's card at six, and Piersoll followed. He came with that alert self-possession which Ewing had come to consider typical of these dwellers in a crowd where each is the inconsiderable part of a great organic body, and must yet preserve his unique oneship."Bully old place, this," Piersoll began. "My mother came to balls here thirty years ago. Show me your stuff."

He dropped into one of the armchairs and lighted a cigarette.

Ewing opened a portfolio and placed drawings along the wall. Piersoll slid his chair closer and studied them.

"They're only little things I've seen," murmured Ewing. "I haven't had a chance to see much."

Piersoll blew out smoke and arose to put one of the drawings in a better light. He gazed at this closely, swept his eye again over the others, and exclaimed, "All right! Bully! Good drawing, and the real thing. That's the point—you've drawn only what you've seen. They're not all equally interesting, but they're all true. You'll do."

"I'm glad you like them. I never knew if they were good."

"They're better than I expected, from Mrs. Laithe's talk. She was so keen about them, I made allowances."

"Mrs. Laithe seemed to think I might sell them."

"Some of those you can sell, undoubtedly. The others show what you can do. They'll get your orders. The magazines are using a lot of Western stuff. That ranchman's wife there in her poor little flower garden, surrounded by a million miles of sage and cactus—fine! It's a story picture, and the story's good. The Knickerbocker might use that. They might want a series from you—six drawings or so—'Scenes of Ranch Life.'"

"It sounds too good."

"It's not, and you'll get stories to illustrate. Can you draw a pretty cowboy?"

"Pretty?""The kind in the magazine story. Harvard man, half-back, old New York family, named Van-Something or other; unhappy love affair; tries ranch life; fearless rider, dead shot 'six feet of clean-limbed, virile young manhood,' is the approved phrase for him. He's a beautiful thing—his man keeps his chaps pressed, and he never is seen needing a shave——"

Ewing grinned appreciatively.

"Girl comes out from New York," continued Piersoll—"the girl, with her fierce aunt—home on north side of Washington Square. I'm going to do an article on the story people who've had fine old homes on the north side of Washington Square—thousands! That one block would have to be ten miles long to hold 'em. Girl in tea gown, fierce aunt with lorgnon—threatened with death—flood, fire, Apaches, stage-robbers, vicious bull, rattler—anything! Rescued by cool, daring, clean-limbed Van-Soforth, who says 'By Jove!' as he risks his life. That is, if it's in one of the respectable magazines. If it's only a young ten-center he says 'Damn!' right out in print. Then, love scene on mesa, faithful cow pony and mountains in background, and return to New York by next train, with clean-limbed Harold in one of our gent's nobby sack suits that sets off the unconscious grace of his slight but muscular figure—oh, you know the story."

"I have read it somewhere—something like it."

"You'll go on reading it. But you'll have to pretty your cowboys if you make the pictures for it. Hulston usually illustrates it. He can draw a cowboy that would make a bunch of violets look coarse."

"I'm afraid I couldn't——"

"Of course you couldn't. But you'll find work. Some of the magazines are becoming reckless and printing stories of cowboys that are almost real. Come along to the club. You'll meet some fellows there. The chap that printed my book is dining with me, but he'll slip off early and we can have the evening together."

"I liked your book," Ewing ventured, when they were in the street.

"Well, that's comforting. I dare say it was easier to read than it was to write. But about this club you're going to—it's a little place we've started lately—illustrators, newspaper men, book writers and that ilk. You must join. I believe I'll be safe in putting you up."

"I never joined a club," Ewing confessed. "Are there conditions?"

"Rigid ones—you must have ten dollars for the entrance-fee, and not be a leper."

"Well"—Ewing debated—"I have the money——"

"That's all you need think about. The other part is ours. We have you in to dine and look you over. Lots of men go there with an idea that they must be witty. One fellow was turned down last week for springing 'made' jokes at the table. I believe he spoke of 'quail on trust' as we were served with that bird—and in the hearing of three members of the board of Abbots. That settled him, of course. They didn't need his imitations of a German dialect comedian, which he sought to convulse them with later. Another man was turned down lately for saying, 'Oh, how quaintly bohemian!' after he'd looked about the grill room. Another was ejected for playing 'chopsticks' on the piano with the edges of his hands. They didn't even let him get to the table. That's the sort of thing—and we're strict, even though we need the money. I'm bursar and I know. There are weird jests about my decamping with the club funds, but I've never had enough surplus yet to take me beyond Rahway."

They ascended the steps of a dingy-fronted brick house in Clinton Place, a little out of the Broadway rush. Passing through a bare, echoing hall, they entered one of the two dining rooms of the club, connected by immense sliding doors, now thrown open. They were broad, lofty rooms with stained floors, mantels of gray marble, and rich old doors of polished mahogany framed in white casements—the drawing rooms of some staid family of a bygone generation, before the trade army had invaded this once quiet neighborhood.

Ewing at once noticed the walls. They had been covered with a grayish-brown cartridge paper, and on this the members of the Monastery had plied their charcoal in fancies more or less attuned to the spirit of the organization. There were monks in most of the pictures, monks combating or, alas! overborne by one or another of that meretricious trinity which ever conspires against godly living. Over the mantel in the first room a pink-fleshed nymph in simple garb of chef's cap allured an all but yielding St. Anthony with one of the club's dinner menus held before his hunger-lit eyes. On a panel to the right of this a befuddled lay brother, having emptied a flagon of wine, perched on the arm of a chair and angled fatuously in a jar of mocking goldfish, to the refrain:

To the left, Brother Hilarius furtively ignored his breviary as he passed a gay affiche, from which a silken-limbed dancer beguiled him with nimble, worldly caperings, and smiles of the flesh and the devil.

"There's a vacant panel or two in the other room," said Piersoll. "We'll save one for you. Come down to the grill room—it's early yet."

They went out through the hall and down a narrow stairway. They heard the lively hum of voices, and Ewing found himself in a low, wainscoted room, finished in dull gray, where a dozen or so men talked loungingly in corners, awaiting the dinner hour.

Piersoll presented him to several of these in so quick a succession that their names became a many-syllabled murmur in his ears. They found seats on a red-cushioned corner bench of churchly pattern, and Piersoll ordered cocktails.

Ewing tried to follow the talk running about him. A boyish-looking reporter for a morning paper was telling at a nearby table how he had been the first to reach the scene of a railroad wreck in Pennsylvania late the night before by fording a swollen river. At another table a successful playwright obligingly expounded the laws of dramatic construction to a respectful novice, who seemed puzzled by their simplicity. At their own table a youth of yellow melancholy confided to Piersoll that the afternoon had witnessed an important transaction in verse—the sale of his ballade, "She Was a Belle in the Days of Daguerre." "The editor of 'Quips' took it and paid on acceptance—let's have another," he added with deep significance.

The atmosphere of the place was unthinkingly democratic. The cub reporter here met his city editor as man to man. Piersoll identified various members of the gathering—the dramatic critic of an evening paper in busy talk with the Wall Street man of the same sheet; a promising young composer cornered by the star reporter of a morning paper, a grizzled knight of the world of war, crime, flood, fire, and all mischance of any news value, a man who had attained the dignity of signing his "stuff." Old men and young, they were compacted of nerves, vividly alive, even those in whom the desk stoop could be detected.

The movable feast of the cocktail waned and the groups drifted upstairs. The publisher for whom Piersoll waited came at last, a bland but keen-eyed gentleman of early middle age, introduced to Ewing as Mr. Layton, of Layton & Company. They followed the others up to the dining room, and Piersoll found a table for three under the drawing of the earnest but miscalculating angler.

Ewing nervously apprehended talk of an abstruse literary character from which he would be debarred. The talk assuredly became abstruse, but it dealt in literary values solely as related to public taste in the novel of commerce, and to the devices of Layton & Company for divining and stimulating that variable quantity.

Instead of descanting on Shakespeare, as Ewing had supposed a publisher would do, Layton, with the soup, plunged into a racy narrative of how he had "boomed" sales of "The Mask of Malcolm" the year before. That had been a success compounded of trifles. Witness Layton's chance view from a car window of a "Mask of Malcolm" poster on a watering cart that toiled through the dusty main street of a remote Western village. He had written to the postmaster of that town for the name of the cart's driver, sent him a copy of the novel inscribed by the author, and enough more posters to cover his cart. Result: a sale in the aroused village and surrounding country of two hundred and eighty "Masks," where otherwise not more than half a dozen would have been sold. Further result: the watering carts of the great mid-West were now cunningly blazoned with incitements to purchase Layton & Company's fiction.

Ewing still feared Shakespeare or Chaucer, or George Eliot, at the least; but the publisher clung to earth, launching into his plans for Piersoll's next book. "The Promotion of Fools" was in its hundredth thousand. The next book must go beyond this.

"You want a smashing good love scene at the end," urged the sapient Layton, "and plenty of good, plain, honest heart feeling all through it. Make a quaintly humorous character, simple-minded, trusting, but still shrewd, and win the reader's sympathy for him by giving him some sort of hard luck—a crippled child that dies isn't bad, if the father has been harsh to him some time, not meaning to be, you know. And not too much dialect; enough to contrast well with the Fifth Avenue people. Then, with the kind of hero you know how to draw—swell family, handsome, refined, a real gentleman, and all that sort of thing, with an English valet—you'll have a story that will go. You can write a winner, Piersoll, if you'll listen to your publisher. We keep our fingers on the public pulse; we know the taste better than you can know it, shut up in your office. And have a good, catchy dedication—people are interested in your personality. Couldn't you have in the next book something like 'To my Mother in Heaven, whose Memory——'""Our people are all Unitarians," suggested Piersoll.

"What difference does that make——"

"And my mother has been graciously spared to us——"

"Well, then, 'To my Gray-haired Mother, whose Loving Counsel has ever—' you know the sort of thing, short and snappy, but full of feeling. It helps, let me tell you, with the people who pick up a book on the stands."

Ewing lost the run of this talk for a time, entertaining himself with a study of the other diners. The rooms had rapidly filled, and two waiters scurried among the tables. His attention focused on a long table in the center of the room, whose occupants made savage and audible comment on diners at other tables, and confided to one another, in loud, free tones, their frank impressions of late comers.

The door opened upon a goodly youth in evening dress. Seven pairs of eyes from the big table fixed him coldly as he removed his overcoat.

A voice, affectedly mincing: "As I live—handsome Harold Armytage!"

Another voice, hoarse with rage: "Curse ye, devil that ye are, with yer oily tongue and city ways! where's me daughter Letty, me little lass, that ye took up to the big city and threatened to make a lady of?"

A voice, hushed and slow: "They—say—the—child—is—in—London."

The newcomer, flicking the ash from his cigarette, glowered at the last speaker and hissed: "As for you, Black Bart, alias Jasper Vinton, remember that one word from me would set all Scotland Yard on your trail!"

A new voice from the table: "Stand back, Hector Walsingham! I would rather be the poor working girl I am than the gilded toy your wealth would make me—and besides, you wear made ties! I'll have to speak to the stage manager about that," continued the speaker in less dramatic tones. "Look, it's one of those horrible made things that fasten at the back of his neck with a harness buckle—see his hand go up to it!"

The newcomer emitted a mocking laugh, but judiciously sought a seat in the next room.

"Say—new idea for a melodrama," came another voice from the long table. "The old thing with an Ibsen twist. Stern father ready to drive erring daughter from his door in a snowstorm, but it won't snow! Of course he can't send her off in pleasant weather. It clouds up every few days, and the old man hopefully gets his speech ready—'Curse ye, ye are no longer a daughter of mine!' but the sun comes out again. Girl gets nervous. Young squire gets nervous, too, though he's married the girl in secret. He begs the old man to put her out and have it over with, even if the weather is pleasant. Old man won't hear of such a thing. Got to have a howling snowstorm. His mind fails; he sits in the chimney corner driveling about the horrible winters they used to have when you could curse a daughter out almost any day in the week. Everybody disgusted at the way things are dragging. Young people quarrel. Divorce! Young squire sails for Labrador to try it again, where you can count on the winters. Girl watches ship out of sight, and it snows! Snows hard. But too late—ah, God, too late! She rushes back home to find the old man delirious with joy. He starts in to do his speech at last, but she slowly strangles him with her muscular young hands. Rather good curtain, that—yes?" He looked around the table appealingly, but the others had turned from him to another newcomer, a young man of dark and sinister aspect, whom they greeted as Simon Legree. Ewing heard Eliza's despairing cry, "Merciful Heavens, the river is choked with ice!" above the deep baying of bloodhounds that issued from half a dozen able throats. The newcomer was obliging enough to scowl and demand fiercely, "Tom, you black rascal, ain't you mine, body and soul?"

A fair-haired youth at the table, with the face of an overfed Cupid, responded pleadingly: "No—no, Massa! Mah body may b'long to yo' but mah soul to de good Lawd who made it!"

"Crack! Crack! Crack! Take that, you black hound, and that, and that!" Uncle Tom cringed under the blows of an imaginary lash, and Legree seated himself at the long table. A bearded man at the head promptly became little Eva, with a piping voice. "Uncle Tom, dear Uncle Tom, I fear I am going to die in the last act."

The faithful slave gulped at his claret and water and replied tearfully, "Dar, dar, Miss Eba, yo' bre'k dis pore ole man's heart!"

"And, dear Uncle Tom, remember that the colored quartet will slink in and sing 'Rock of Ages' while I am dying on a camp bed in the parlor. Think of that, you black hound!"

"Indeed, that is what I am apprehending, Miss St. Clair," returned Uncle Tom, this time in polished accents and with marked urbanity. "And you are doubtless aware that I shall have to be present and listen to it. Come, then, little one! If you must die, come with me into the back yard where the quartet can't find us, and I will feed you to the nice hungry bloodhounds. They've had nothing since tea."

Ewing listened, aghast. He had once gone with Ben in Durango to see "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and both of them had wept at its heartrending crisis. It embarrassed him now to hear its pathos blasphemed, embarrassed him because he felt a sort of shamed mirth. He was glad that Ben was not by.

Piersoll and his publisher still discussed literature. Layton was now setting forth the superior state of the latter-day author over those of the past.

"Those old fellows had no market—publishers were a sleepy lot. Think what could have been done with 'Paradise Lost,' illustrated by Hulston with about fifty half tones and marginal decorations, and an elegant binding, properly advertised with testimonials from clergymen and leading actresses and senators and prominent college presidents. I tell you, gentlemen," he concluded, earnestly, "this is the golden age of letters!"

This phrase unhappily reaching the big table in a moment of quiet, made an instant sensation.

"The golden age of letters!" was echoed in concert by eight men who arose solemnly and bowed to the embarrassed Layton. He tried to smile tolerantly, as if he knew a joke when he saw one. They sat down and turned to stare at him with extravagant awe, catching his eye when they could and drinking to the golden age. Piersoll grinned cheerfully at them. Ewing was puzzled.

"I like this place for its literary atmosphere," said one loudly, gazing over the head of Layton. "Don't you all just love literature?" "Oh, I simply adore it!" answered the next man. "I really can't say what I should do without books. I think they improve the mind."

Now they hitched their chairs about so that they could regard Layton more easily, though they affected to be unconscious of his presence.

"It does seem to me that literature is good to read," ventured another conservatively, "but then, I love music and flowers and the little birds."

"I should die without literature," insisted another—"it's so good and excellent. Oh, why do not more people read literature and be decent!"

"Now you take Henry James," began another, judicially, "he's a bright writer, but he can't touch the great throbbing heart of the public like Hall Caine can."

"What is a Hall Caine can?" demanded the whiskered person bluntly. "I thought they kept 'em in jars."

Layton rose, genially bidding his host and Ewing good night. The men at the long table rose with him, bowed ceremoniously, and chanted "the golden age of letters" as he passed—all but one, who sobbed bitterly because poor Shakespeare had not lived to see it.

Ewing was still dazed, but he had slowly been growing cheerful. He felt that he could almost understand this strange fooling. He would have been glad to observe it still from a distance, but Piersoll took him to the long table when Layton had gone. The others made room for them, and Ewing responded somewhat timidly to the introductions that Piersoll performed. He was a little anxious lest he be made a part or target of their sport and show himself awkward under the ordeal. For the moment, however, there were remarks about the undesirability of "tradesmen" as guests of the club.

"I know a lovely delicatessen merchant," said one brightly, "a most interesting person. He says this is the golden age of cooked provisions. I must have him round the next time Layton is brought in."

"I can get a plumber from over on Eighth Avenue," volunteered another. "We might have a 'trade' night, if Layton will come. Of course they'll talk about nothing but how to sell their wares, but they'll have a good time together."

Presently they forsook this theme, and Ewing found himself talking to Chalmers, an illustrator with whose work he had long been familiar. Though Chalmers drew Western subjects, Ewing was amazed at his confession that he had never been west of Jersey City. Chalmers, on the other hand, was delighted to learn that Ewing had so long been a part of that life which he had portrayed from afar, and was at once profuse with offers of help when Ewing explained his situation. He was eager to see his work, and would install him in a studio.

"I know the place for you," he exclaimed, after a moment's reflection. "There's a vacant studio in our building on Forty-second Street. Billy Glynn told me to sublet it and sell the stuff the first chance I had. You can move in right off if you like it."

Ewing thanked him warmly. It was pleasant to find that the recent Simon Legree had his human side. Two of the other men at the table had studios in the same building: Crandall, who made pictures for a comic weekly, and Baldwin, who was a magazine illustrator. They became, like Chalmers, solicitous to oblige the newcomer, and were attentive to Piersoll when he praised, with a quick word or two, the drawings of Ewing. He felt immensely drawn to these men who had dropped their bantering to be kind to him.The crowd of diners had thinned out until only a few lingered over their coffee. From one or another of these scattered groups would come a burst of laughter at the climax of a story, or a bar of song from one who had reached his playtime of the day, and recked not if he advertised this. It was an hour of ease in the Monastery, when its inmates expanded in the knowledge that Sunday lay before them. To some, at least, this could be a day of rest.

A musical member came from the rear room to the piano near the long table to play a Liszt rhapsody. When this performer had gone back to his seat one of the men from the big table—he who had lately enacted Little Eva, and whose title of "The Brushwood Boy" Ewing at once related to his beard—seated himself at the instrument.

"Heard a great song over on Third Avenue last night," he began. "Wish I could remember—something like this—" His fingers searched for the melody. Ewing caught a transient strain of it and thrilled to recognize Ben's favorite, a thing he might be singing to his guitar in the far-off lonely cabin at that very moment.

"'The Fatal Wedding,'" he ventured to the performer.

"Sure—that's it! 'The Fatal Wedding.' Wish you fellows could have heard it—rich! How did it go, now?"

Ewing recklessly hummed the opening bars.

"Go ahead, if you know it!" This came from several of the men. He protested. He would have liked to sing it, yet feared to do so before an audience whose ridicule he had learned to dread. He considered the song to be irreproachable and could understand the apparent enthusiasm about it, but he doubted his worth as a vocalist.

"I don't believe I'd better try it," he began; "I know the words—it's the favorite song of an old-time cowboy I've lived with, and he does it right. I couldn't give anything more than a poor imitation of him."

The inciting calls were renewed.

"Go on! Do your worst! Show us how your friend does it! Silence in the back of the hall!"

Piersoll smiled encouragingly and the accompanist struck the opening chords, having at last recalled the air. Ewing diffidently took his place at the end of the piano, with apologetic protests. "I'll do my best, but you should hear Ben Crider sing this."

The little audience listened with unfeigned delight as he sang of the handsome stranger who wooed the village beauty, only to desert her for "a lady proud and haughty" who had "houses, jewels, land, and gold at her command." The words moved his hearers. Had he not promised them to render the song in his friend's manner? They felt he was achieving this with rare art. Almost unconsciously, indeed, he sang the song in Ben's best manner, with a sob in the voice and even with Ben's strained, sad face as he reached the pitiful climax:

He moved quickly back to his chair almost before the first shouts of laughter dismayed him. He blushed and glanced appealingly from face to face as the applause was swelled by the groups in the rear room. He and Ben had considered this no song to be laughed at. It was too sad. Yet he saw that the applause was a friendly tribute to his performance. Piersoll was pounding him joyously between the shoulders and Chalmers was urging him to do Ben Crider singing the "Fatal Wedding" at their next club smoker. Baldwin demanded the last verse again, and Ewing sang it, from his chair this time, redoubling his efforts to bring out its pathos.

In the new applause that deafened him he felt reassured. At least they were not laughing at him. He joined weakly in the merriment. The gods had blessed him with a gift for silence at critical moments. He asked no questions.

As the mirth subsided voices were heard unctuously rehearsing choice lines from the song. A passion for the ballad pathetic had been aroused. Some one called on Chalmers.

"Chalmers has written a song himself—give it to us, Chalmers—the one you sang up at Needham's the other night." Chalmers took his place and bowed low as the accompanist poised eager hands above the key-board.

"Gentlemen, with your kind attention, I'll give you a little thing called 'Nothing but Mother'—words and music by a party that doesn't want his real name known because the folks back home might hear of it. Let her go, Professor!"

In a twangy, nasal voice, not unlike Ben's, enunciating his words with the fastidious and strained precision of the music-hall balladist, he began:

The last line had been achieved with intense, passionate emphasis. Ewing, listening intently, felt the pricking of a nameless suspicion. The song seemed right enough, and yet some queer, ulterior emotion stirred within him. The air continued in a stirring minor, adapted to the dramatic action:

With secret consternation Ewing waited, trying to laugh with the others, who had exploded at "tears," wrenched out in a high minor wail. The air now took a graceful swinging waltz movement, and the puzzled youth suffered an illumining flash:

Enlightened at last, Ewing joined in the applause, amid which Chalmers resumed his seat. Instantly perceiving why they had laughed at his own song, he burned at recalling how chance alone had saved him from betraying a simple-hearted faith in the virtues of that gem. Now it was funny, even to him. Other songs of Ben's rang in his ears; they were all funny—though he must never let Ben know that. He had unwittingly betrayed Ben to a ribald crew, but he had learned a thing it was well to know. He had learned of the world; he had aged in a leap.

They sat late at table, drinking beer from stone mugs, smoking long-stemmed pipes and trifling with song. They blended their voices in melting harmony at the climax of "Nelly's" woe and in the acuter parts of "Nothing but Mother."

As they drifted out at midnight Chalmers made an appointment with Ewing to inspect the vacant studio and make himself, if he liked, one of the colony of not too serious workers housed by the Rookery.

Half a dozen men strolled with him to the Stuyvesant, and in the shadow of its sober doors, as a parting testimonial to his worth, they sang once more in blended pathos:

He watched them up the street a block, pouring out their hearts in song to a watchful and cynical policeman.