“Oh, come off your perch!” said the other man, who wore glasses.  “Your premises won’t come out in the wash.  You wind-jammers who apply bandy-legged theories to concrete categorical syllogisms send logical conclusions skallybootin’ into the infinitesimal ragbag.  You can’t pull my leg with an old sophism with whiskers on it.  You quote Marx and Hyndman and Kautsky—­what are they?—­shines!  Tolstoi?—­his garret is full of rats.  I put it to you over the home-plate that the idea of a cooperative commonwealth and an abolishment of competitive systems simply takes the rag off the bush and gives me hyperesthesia of the roopteetoop!  The skookum house for yours!”

I stopped a few yards away and took out my little notebook.

“Oh, come ahead,” said Rivington, somewhat nervously; “you don’t want to listen to that.”

“Why, man,” I whispered, “this is just what I do want to hear.  These slang types are among your city’s most distinguishing features.  Is this the Bowery variety?  I really must hear more of it.”

“If I follow you,” said the man who had spoken first, “you do not believe it possible to reorganize society on the basis of common interest?”

“Shinny on your own side!” said the man with glasses.  “You never heard any such music from my foghorn.  What I said was that I did not believe it practicable just now.  The guys with wads are not in the frame of mind to slack up on the mazuma, and the man with the portable tin banqueting canister isn’t exactly ready to join the Bible class.  You can bet your variegated socks that the situation is all spifflicated up from the Battery to breakfast!  What the country needs is for some bully old bloke like Cobden or some wise guy like old Ben Franklin to sashay up to the front and biff the nigger’s head with the baseball.  Do you catch my smoke?  What?”

Rivington pulled me by the arm impatiently.

“Please come on,” he said.  “Let’s go see something.  This isn’t what you want.”

“Indeed, it is,” I said resisting.  “This tough talk is the very stuff that counts.  There is a picturesqueness about the speech of the lower order of people that is quite unique.  Did you say that this is the Bowery variety of slang?”

“Oh, well,” said Rivington, giving it up, “I’ll tell you straight.  That’s one of our college professors talking.  He ran down for a day or two at the club.  It’s a sort of fad with him lately to use slang in his conversation.  He thinks it improves language.  The man he is talking to is one of New York’s famous social economists.  Now will you come on.  You can’t use that, you know.”

“No,” I agreed; “I can’t use that.  Would you call that typical of New York?”

“Of course not,” said Rivington, with a sigh of relief.  “I’m glad you see the difference.  But if you want to hear the real old tough Bowery slang I’ll take you down where you’ll get your fill of it.”

“I would like it,” I said; “that is, if it’s the real thing.  I’ve often read it in books, but I never heard it.  Do you think it will be dangerous to go unprotected among those characters?”