It was a quiet day for all of us, though I got my shopping started, and at night we met at the hotel and had a lonesome dinner.  We was all too dazed and tired to feel like larking about any, and poor Ben was so downright depressed it was pathetic.  Ever read the story about a man going to sleep and waking up in a glass case in a museum a thousand years later?  That was Ben coming back to his old town after only twenty-five years.  He hadn’t been able to find a single old friend nor any familiar faces.  He ordered a porterhouse steak, family style, for himself, but he was so mournful he couldn’t eat more than about two dollars’ worth of it.  He kept forgetting himself in dismal reminiscences.  The onlysright thing he’d found was the men tearing up the streets.  That was just like they used to be, he said.  He maundered on to us about how horse-cars was running on Broadway when he left and how they hardly bothered to light the lamps north of Forty-second Street, and he wished he could have some fish balls like the old Sinclair House used to have for its free lunch, and how in them golden days people that had been born right here in New York was seen so frequently that they created no sensation.

He was feeling awful desolate about this.  He pointed out different parties at tables around us, saying they was merchant princes from Sandusky or prominent Elks from Omaha or roystering blades from Pittsburgh or boulevardeers from Bucyrus—­not a New Yorker in sight.  He said he’d been reading where a wealthy nut had seat out an expedition to the North Pole to capture a certain kind of Arctic flea that haunts only a certain rare fox—­but he’d bet a born New Yorker was harder to find.  He said what this millionaire defective ought to of done with his inherited wealth was to find a male and female born here and have ’em stuffed and mounted under glass in a fire-proof museum, which would be a far more exciting spectacle than any flea on earth, however scarce and arctic.  He said he’d asked at least forty men that day where they was born—­waiters, taxi-drivers, hotel clerks, bartenders, and just anybody that would stop and take one with him, and not a soul had been born nearer to the old town than Scranton, Pennsylvania.  “It’s heart-rending,” he says, “to reflect that I’m alone here in this big city of outlanders.  I haven’t even had the nerve to go down to West Ninth Street for a look at the old home that shelters my boyhood memories.  If I could find only one born New Yorker it would brace me up a whole lot.”

It was one dull evening, under this cloud that enveloped Ben.  We didn’t even go to a show, but turned in early.  Lon Price sent a picture card of the Flatiron Building to Henrietta telling her he was having a dreary time and he was now glad he’d been disappointed about her not coming, so love and kisses from her lonesome boy.  It was what he would of sent her anyway, but it happened to be the truth so far.