"No man ever learned to be a drunkard on five-cent whisky."

Think of it, tippler.  It covers the ground from the sprouting rye to the Potter’s Field.

A clean-profiled, erect young man in the rear rank of the bedless emulated the terrapin, drawing his head far down into the shell of his coat collar.  It was a well-cut tweed coat; and the trousers still showed signs of having flattened themselves beneath the compelling goose.  But, conscientiously, I must warn the milliner’s apprentice who reads this, expecting a Reginald Montressor in straits, to peruse no further.  The young man was no other than Thomas McQuade, ex-coachman, discharged for drunkenness one month before, and now reduced to the grimy ranks of the one-night bed seekers.

If you live in smaller New York you must know the Van Smuythe family carriage, drawn by the two 1,500-pound, 100 to 1-shot bays.  The carriage is shaped like a bath-tub.  In each end of it reclines an old lady Van Smuythe holding a black sunshade the size of a New Year’s Eve feather tickler.  Before his downfall Thomas McQuade drove the Van Smuythe bays and was himself driven by Annie, the Van Smuythe lady’s maid.  But it is one of the saddest things about romance that a tight shoe or an empty commissary or an aching tooth will make a temporary heretic of any Cupid-worshiper.  And Thomas’s physical troubles were not few.  Therefore, his soul was less vexed with thoughts of his lost lady’s maid than it was by the fancied presence of certain non-existent things that his racked nerves almost convinced him were flying, dancing, crawling, and wriggling on the asphalt and in the air above and around the dismal campus of the Bed Line army.  Nearly four weeks of straight whisky and a diet limited to crackers, bologna, and pickles often guarantees a psycho-zoological sequel.  Thus desperate, freezing, angry, beset by phantoms as he was, he felt the need of human sympathy and intercourse.

The Bed Liner standing at his right was a young man of about his own age, shabby but neat.

“What’s the diagnosis of your case, Freddy?” asked Thomas, with the freemasonic familiarity of the damned—­“Booze?  That’s mine.  You don’t look like a panhandler.  Neither am I. A month ago I was pushing the lines over the backs of the finest team of Percheron buffaloes that ever made their mile down Fifth Avenue in 2.85.  And look at me now!  Say; how do you come to be at this bed bargain-counter rummage sale.”

The other young man seemed to welcome the advances of the airy ex-coachman.

“No,” said he, “mine isn’t exactly a case of drink.  Unless we allow that Cupid is a bartender.  I married unwisely, according to the opinion of my unforgiving relatives.  I’ve been out of work for a year because I don’t know how to work; and I’ve been sick in Bellevue and other hospitals for months.  My wife and kid had to go back to her mother.  I was turned out of the hospital yesterday.  And I haven’t a cent.  That’s my tale of woe.”