you.  We real ones do not forget.  But I have your number.  Would you like me to tell you a few things?  Oh, I have your dossier, all right.  Let me see.  The first time I carried you you were an infant howling abominably.  You were lifted in somewhere in the ‘Fifties,’ and three blocks farther down a fat old man got out, muttering, ‘Why don’t they keep those brats off the stages!’ The next time you were still howling.  You were about six, and you had been taken to the old Booth Theatre at the corner of Twenty-third Street and Sixth Avenue, and had seen ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ and when the wolf said, ‘All the better to eat you with, my dear,’ you burst into a frightened bawl, and had to be hurried out.  Soon after I saw you on a balcony near the Square watching a political procession go by.  Then there were a few years that I missed you, and then a period when I saw you often.  I had grown rather to like you, until one Thanksgiving Day morning.  You snubbed me direct.  There were buses covered with coloured bunting in front of the Fifth Avenue Hotel.  You climbed on one.  Again you were howling, this time methodically, deliberately, in chorus with a number of other young lunatics.  I tried my best to be friendly, but not a look would you give me.  You were too busy shouting and waving a flag.  Say, do you want any more of those little personal reminiscences?”

I did not.  I mumbled a few words of lame apology, pleading the thoughtlessness of youth.  The excuses were apparently taken in the proper spirit, for again the voice was tearful.

“Ah, but those were the good old days!  Out here I love to think of them and to recall my youth.  I am battered now, and my joints creak.  But once I was all fresh paint and varnish, one of the aristocrats of city travel.  How I used to look down upon the bob-tailed cars at the cross-town streets.  Besides I was not merely one of the splendid Old Guard, I was the bus—­the one of which they used to tell the famous story.  Others may claim the distinction, but they are impostors, sir, rank impostors.  I was the bus.  What!  You don’t mean to say that you have never heard it?”

Humbly I acknowledged my ignorance, and listened to a tale that, I was assured, had once been told in every club corner and over every dinner table on the Avenue.

“It was nine o’clock of a blustery March night.  Mulligan was not my driver on the trip, but Casey, who had been imbibing rather freely at the corner place of refreshment during the wait.  Empty we left the starting point under the ’L. curve on South Fifth Avenue.  Empty we crossed the Square.  At the Eighth Street corner, in front of the Brevoort, we stopped.  A gentleman and his wife entered.  We proceeded.  At Nineteenth Street we were again hailed.  Three young men were standing at the curb.  The one in the middle had evidently been drinking, for his head was drooping, and he was leaning heavily upon his companions.  He was helped in and placed far forward, just under