That section of Hoboken waterfront, along toward the green promontory crowned by Stevens Institute, still has a war-time flavour.  The old Hamburg-American line piers are used by the Army Transport Service, and in the sunshine a number of soldiers, off duty, were happily drowsing on a row of two-tiered beds set outdoors in the April pleasantness.  There was a racket of bugles, and a squad seemed to be drilling in the courtyard.  Endymion and the Secretary, after sitting on a pier-end watching some barges, and airing their nautical views in a way they would never have done had any pukka seafaring men been along, were stricken with the very crisis of spring fever and lassitude.  They considered the possibility of hiring one of the soldiers’ two-tiered beds for the afternoon.  Perhaps it is the first two syllables of Hoboken’s name that make it so desperately debilitating to the wayfarer in an April noonshine.  Perhaps it was a kind of old nostalgia, for the Secretary remembered that sailormen’s street as it had been some years ago, when he had been along there in search of schooners of another sort.

But anatomizing their anguish, these creatures finally decided that it might not be spring fever, but merely hunger.  They saw the statue of the late Mr. Sloan of the Lackawanna Railroad—­Sam Sloan, the bronze calls him, with friendly familiarity.  The aspiring forelock of that statue, and the upraised finger of Samuel Sullivan Cox ("The Letter Carriers’ Friend”) in Astor Place, the club considers two of the most striking things in New York statuary.  Mr. Pappanicholas, who has a candy shop in the high-spirited building called Duke’s House, near the ferry terminal, must be (Endymion thought) some relative of Santa Claus.  Perhaps he is Santa Claus, and the club pondered on the quite new idea that Santa Claus has lived in Hoboken all these years and no one had guessed it.  The club asked a friendly policeman if there were a second-hand bookstore anywhere near.  “Not that I know of,” he said.  But they did find a stationery store where there were a number of popular reprints in the window, notably “The Innocence of Father Brown,” and Andrew Lang’s “My Own Fairy Book.”

But lunch was still to be considered.  The club is happy to add The American Hotel, Hoboken, to its private list of places where it has been serenely happy.  Consider corned beef hash, with fried egg, excellent, for 25 cents.  Consider rhubarb pie, quite adequate, for 10 cents.  Consider the courteous and urbane waiter.  In one corner of the dining room was the hotel office, with a large array of push buttons communicating with the bedrooms.  The club, its imagination busy, conceived that these were for the purpose of awakening seafaring guests early in the morning, so as not to miss their ship.  If we were, for instance, second mate of the Hauppauge, and came to port in Hoboken, The American Hotel would be just the place where we would want to put up.