George Washington, with his right arm up- raised, sits his iron horse at the lower corner of Union Square, forever signaling the Broadway cars to stop as they round the curve into Fourteenth Street. But the cars buzz on, heedless, as they do at the beck of a private citizen, and the great General must feel, unless his nerves are iron, that rapid tran- sit gloria mundi.
Should the General raise his left hand as he has raised his right it would point to a quarter of the city that forms a haven for the oppressed and sup- pressed of foreign lands. In the cause of national or personal freedom they have found a refuge here, and the patriot who made it for them sits his steed, overlooking their district, while he listens through his left car to vaudeville that caricatures the posterity of his proteges. Italy, Poland, the former Spanish possessions and the polyglot tribes of Austria-Hun- gary have spilled here a thick lather of their effer- vescent sons. In the eccentric cafes and lodging- houses of the vicinity they hover over their native wines and political secrets. The colony changes with much frequency. Faces disappear from the haunts to be replaced by others. Whither do these uneasy birds flit? For half of the answer observe carefully the suave foreign air and foreign courtesy of the next waiter who serves your table d'hote.
For the other half, perhaps if the barber shops had tongues (and who will dispute it?) they could tell their share.
Titles are as plentiful as finger rings among these transitory exiles. For lack of proper exploitation a stock of titled goods large enough to supply the trade of upper Fifth Avenue is here condemned to a mere pushcart traffic. The new-world landlords who en- tertain these offshoots of nobility are not dazzled by coronets and crests. They have doughnuts to sell instead of daughters. With them it is a serious matter of trading in flour and sugar instead of pearl powder and bonbons.
These assertions are deemed fitting as an intro- duction to the tale, which is of plebeians and contains no one with even the ghost of a title.
Katy Dempsey's mother kept a furnished-room house in this oasis of the aliens. The business was not profitable. If the two scraped together enough to meet the landlord's agent on rent day and nego- tiate for the ingredients of a daily Irish stew they called it success. Often the stew lacked both meat and potatoes. Sometimes it became as bad as con- somme' with music.
In this mouldy old house Katy waxed plump and pert and wholesome and as beautiful and freckled as a tiger lily. She was the good fairy who was guilty of placing the damp clean towels and cracked pitchers of freshly laundered Croton in the lodgers' rooms.
You are informed (by virtue of the privileges of astronomical discovery) that the star lodger's name was Mr. Brunelli. His wearing a yellow tie and pay- ing his rent promptly distinguished him from the other lodgers. His raiment was splendid, his com- plexion olive, his, mustache fierce, his manners a prince's, his rings and pins as magnificent as those of a traveling dentist.
He had breakfast served in his room, and he ate it in a red dressing gown with green tassels. He left the house at noon and returned at midnight. Those were mysterious hours, but there was nothing my- terious about Mrs. Dempsey's lodgers except the things that were not mysterious. One of Mr. Kip- ling's poems is addressed to "Ye who hold the un- written clue to all save all unwritten thing." The same "readers" are invited to tackle the foregoing assertion.
Mr. Brunelli, being impressionable and a Latin, fell to conjugating the verb "amare," with Katy in the objective case, though not because of antipathy.
She talked it over with her mother.
"Sure, I like him," said Katy. "He's more po- liteness than twinty candidates for Alderman, and lie makes me feel like a queen whin he walks at me side.
But what is he, I dinno? I've me suspicions. The marnin'll coom whin he'll throt out the picture av his baronial halls and ax to have the week's rint hung up in the ice chist along wid all the rist of 'em."
"'Tis true," admitted Mrs. Dempsey, "that he seems to be a sort iv a Dago, and too coolchured in his spache for a rale gentleman. But ye may be mis- judgin' him. Ye should niver suspect any wan of bein' of noble descint that pays cash and pathronizes the laundry rig'lar."
"He's the same tbricks of spakin' and blarneyin' wid his hands," sighed Katy, "as the Frinch noble- man at Mrs. Toole's that ran away wid Mr. Toole's Sunday pants and left the photograph of the Bastile, his grandfather's chat-taw, as security for tin weeks' rint."
Mr. Brunelli continued his calorific wooing. Katy continued to hesitate. One day he asked her out to dine and she felt that a denouement was in the air.
While they are on their way, with Katy in her best muslin, you must take as an entr'acte a brief peep at New York's Bohemia.
'Tonio's restaurant is in Bohemia. The very lo- cation of it is secret. If you wish to know where it is ask the first person you meet. He will tell you in a whisper. 'Tonio discountenances custom; he keeps his house-front black and forbidding; he gives you a pretty bad dinner; he locks his door at the dining hour; but he knows spaghetti as the boarding-house knows cold veal; and -- he has deposited many dol- lars in a certain Banco di -- something with many gold vowels in the name on its windows.
To this restaurant Mr. Brunelli conducted Katy.