“’Oh, the Bowery, the Bowery,
    They say such things and they do such things
    On the Bowery,’

“Or maybe it’s: 

    “’You will think she’s going to faint,
    But she’ll fool you, for she ain’t;
    She has been there many times before.’”

“I see,” said I, for both the theft of ideas and the pretence of innocence were too flagrant; “that your memories are of what we lovingly called ‘the golden,’ and detractors called the ‘yellow’ nineties.  We were both young once.”

But the assumption of friendliness seemed only to irritate.

“The nineties!  Why, I was an old man in the nineties!  An old, old man!  I wasn’t a youngster in the eighties, or the seventies, for that matter.  There’s another one of the old Avenue buses on this line.  No. 27.  He says he is older than I am.  He’s a liar.  Sometimes I think I am the oldest bus in all the world, and that I ought to be enjoying myself in the Smithsonian, instead of dragging out my existence bumping over boulders and prairie grass.

“Come to think of it,” the old bus went on meditatively, “the Smithsonian does not appeal to me after all.  I think that I would be better pleased in a corner of the Third Degree room down at Number 300 Mulberry Street, or in the Chamber of Horrors at the Eden Musee.  For, as you may have noticed, I am partial to crime.  It is the result of my bringing up.  It is the excitement of my early days that I miss most now.  When I first came out here it was with a feeling of pleased expectancy.  I anticipated a daily hold-up.  I had visions of stage robbers in cambric masks, and running gun fights, and horses in frightened flight, and my driver stricken to the heart and tumbling from his seat.  But it is a degenerate and tame world out here.  Give me little old New York.”

“But the statistics—­” I began.

“You do not know one-quarter.  The police do not know one-half.  But I know.  You have read what the papers have printed, or what some retired Inspector has seen fit to tell in his Memoirs.  You did not pass, night after night, the sinister house of the woman whose open boast was that, if she wished to, she could take half the roofs off the Avenue.  You did not know how real that terrible threat was, for you never saw the cloaked men issuing from its doors bearing their ghastly burdens.  You have heard of the Burdell murder but you never knew the real solution.  You have read of the Nathan murder at the corner of the Avenue and Twenty-third Street.  But you did not hear, as I heard, that piercing wail, or see the shaking figure that climbed on my rear step at Twenty-fourth Street and rode twenty blocks northward.  A man once wrote an Australian story called ‘The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.’  My life had not one mystery but a score of mysteries.  You think you know something of Fifth Avenue.  What do you know of the killing the Girl in Green, or of Colt and the William Street printer, the Suicides of No.  X Washington Square, North, or The Enigma of the Fifteenth Street House, or of The Case of Giuseppe and the Italian Ambassador, which was hushed up by orders from Washington and Rome, or The Affair of the Titled Sexton, or The Madison Square Tower Episode?”