Out of the west leaped a meteor, lighting the roof of the skyscraper almost to midday.  Its fiery parabola was limned against the sky toward the east.  It hissed as it went, and Daisy screamed.

“Take me down,” she cried, vehemently, “you—­you mental arithmetic!”

Dabster got her to the elevator, and inside of it.  She was wild-eyed, and she shuddered when the express made its debilitating drop.

Outside the revolving door of the skyscraper the philosopher lost her.  She vanished; and he stood, bewildered, without figures or statistics to aid him.

Joe had a lull in trade, and by squirming among his stock succeeded in lighting a cigarette and getting one cold foot against the attenuated stove.

The door was burst open, and Daisy, laughing, crying, scattering fruit and candies, tumbled into his arms.

“Oh, Joe, I’ve been up on the skyscraper.  Ain’t it cozy and warm and homelike in here!  I’m ready for you, Joe, whenever you want me.”

XV

A BIRD OF BAGDAD

Without a doubt much of the spirit and genius of the Caliph Harun Al Rashid descended to the Margrave August Michael von Paulsen Quigg.

Quigg’s restaurant is in Fourth Avenue—­that street that the city seems to have forgotten in its growth.  Fourth Avenue—­born and bred in the Bowery—­staggers northward full of good resolutions.

Where it crosses Fourteenth Street it struts for a brief moment proudly in the glare of the museums and cheap theatres.  It may yet become a fit mate for its high-born sister boulevard to the west, or its roaring, polyglot, broad-waisted cousin to the east.  It passes Union Square; and here the hoofs of the dray horses seem to thunder in unison, recalling the tread of marching hosts—­Hooray!  But now come the silent and terrible mountains—­buildings square as forts, high as the clouds, shutting out the sky, where thousands of slaves bend over desks all day.  On the ground floors are only little fruit shops and laundries and book shops, where you see copies of “Littell’s Living Age” and G. W. M. Reynold’s novels in the windows.  And next—­poor Fourth Avenue!—­the street glides into a mediaeval solitude.  On each side are shops devoted to “Antiques.”

Let us say it is night.  Men in rusty armor stand in the windows and menace the hurrying cars with raised, rusty iron gauntlets.  Hauberks and helms, blunderbusses, Cromwellian breastplates, matchlocks, creeses, and the swords and daggers of an army of dead-and-gone gallants gleam dully in the ghostly light.  Here and there from a corner saloon (lit with Jack-o’-lanterns or phosphorus), stagger forth shuddering, home-bound citizens, nerved by the tankards within to their fearsome journey adown that eldrich avenue lined with the bloodstained weapons of the fighting dead.  What street could live inclosed by these mortuary relics, and trod by these spectral citizens in whose sunken hearts scarce one good whoop or tra-la-la remained?