manner till their foreman unlocked a couple of big piano boxes.  Out of these they took crowbars, axes, shovels, and other instruments of their calling.  Ben Sutton has been standing there soddenly waiting for another dear old horse-car to come by, but suddenly he takes notice of these bandits with the tools and I see an evil gleam come into his tired eyes.  He assumes a businesslike air, struts over to the foreman of the bunch, and has some quick words with him, making sweeping motions of the arm up and down the cross street where the horse-cars run.  After a minute of this I’m darned if the whole bunch didn’t scatter out and begin to tear up the pavement along the car-track on this cross street.  Ben tripped back to us looking cheerful once more.

“They wouldn’t sell me the car,” he says, “so I’m going to take back a bunch of the dear old rails.  They’ll be something to remind me of the dead past.  Just think!  I rode over those very rails when I was a tot.”

We was all kind of took back at this, and I promptly warned Ben that we’d better beat it before we got pinched.  But Ben is confident.  He says no crime could be safer in New York than setting a bunch of Italians to tearing up a street-car track; that no one could ever possibly suspect it wasn’t all right, though he might have to be underhanded to some extent in getting his souvenir rails hauled off.  He said he had told the foreman that he was the contractor’s brother and had been sent with this new order and the foreman had naturally believed it, Ben looking like a rich contractor himself.

And there they was at work, busy as beavers, gouging up the very last remnant of little old New York when it was that.  Ben rubbed his hands in ecstasy and pranced up and down watching ’em for awhile.  Then he went over and told the foreman there’d be extra pay for all hands if they got a whole block tore up by noon, because this was a rush job.  Hundreds of people was passing, mind you, including a policeman now and then, but no one took any notice of a sight so usual.  All the same the rest of us edged north about half a block, ready to make a quick getaway.  Ben kept telling us we was foolishly scared.  He offered to bet any one in the party ten to one in thousands that he could switch his gang over to Broadway and have a block of that track up before any one got wise.  There was no takers.

Ben was now so pleased with himself and his little band of faithful workers that he even begun to feel kindly again toward his New Yorker who was still standing in one spot with glazed eyes.  He goes up and tries to engage him in conversation, but the lad can’t hear any more than he can see.  Ben’s efforts, however, finally start him to muttering something.  He says it over and over to himself and at last we make out what it is.  He is saying:  “I’d like to buy a little drink for the party m’self.”

“The poor creature is delirious,” says Jake Berger.