resembled shop assistants.  We saw a Hebraic theater, whose hospitable proprietor informed us how he had discovered a great play-writing genius, and how on the previous Saturday night he had turned away seven thousand patrons for lack of room!  Certainly on our night the house was crammed; and the play seemed of realistic quality, and the actresses effulgently lovely.  We saw a Polack dancing-hall, where the cook-girls were slatterns, but romantic slatterns.  We saw Seward Park, which is the dormitory of the East Side in summer.  We saw a van clattering off with prisoners to the night court.  We saw illustrious burglars, “gunmen,” and “dukes” of famous streets—­for we had but to raise a beckoning finger, and they approached us, grinning, out of gloomy shadows. (And very ordinary they seemed in spite of slashed faces!)

We even saw Chinatown, and the wagonettes of tourists stationary in its streets.  I had suspected that Chinatown was largely a show for tourists.  When I asked how it existed, I was told that the two thousand Chinese of Chinatown lived on the ten thousand Chinese who came into it from all quarters on Sundays, and I understood.  As a show it lacked convincingness—­except the delicatessen-shop, whose sights and odors silenced criticism.  It had the further disadvantage, by reason of its tawdry appeals of color and light, of making one feel like a tourist.  Above a certain level of culture, no man who is a tourist has the intellectual honesty to admit to himself that he is a tourist.  Such honesty is found only on the lower levels.  The detective saved our pride from time to time by introducing us to sights which the despicable ordinary tourists cannot see.  It was a proud moment for us when we assisted at a conspiratorial interview between our detective and the “captain of the precincts.”  And it was a proud moment when in an inconceivable retreat we were permitted to talk with an aged Chinese actor and view his collection of flowery hats.  It was a still prouder (and also a subtly humiliating) moment when we were led through courtyards and beheld in their cloistral aloofness the American legitimate wives of wealthy China-men, sitting gorgeous, with the quiescence of odalisques, in gorgeous uncurtained interiors.  I was glad when one of the ladies defied the detective by abruptly swishing down her blind.

But these affairs did not deeply stir my imagination.  More engaging was the detective’s own habit of stopping the automobile every hundred yards or so in order to point out the exact spot on which a murder, or several murders, had been committed.  Murder was his chief interest.  I noticed the same trait in many newspaper men, who would sit and tell excellent murder stories by the hour.  But murder was so common on the East Side that it became for me curiously puerile—­a sort of naughtiness whose punishment, to be effective, ought to wound, rather than flatter, the vanity of the child-minded murderers.  More engaging still was the extraordinary