“She’s crying for you,” said the Tramp Juggler.  “For love of you she’s fighting three, and calling your name so loud they don’t dare to raise the curtain.  Wake up, man.”

“For love of me?” said Bob Hart with staring eyes.  “Don’t I tell you it’s too late?  It’s too late, man.  Why, Cherry and I have been married two years!”

II

THE GOLD THAT GLITTERED

A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito.  It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience.  Therefore let us have the moral first and be done with it.  All is not gold that glitters, but it is a wise child that keeps the stopper in his bottle of testing acid.

Where Broadway skirts the corner of the square presided over by George the Veracious is the Little Rialto.  Here stand the actors of that quarter, and this is their shibboleth:  “‘Nit,’ says I to Frohman, ’you can’t touch me for a kopeck less than two-fifty per,’ and out I walks.”

Westward and southward from the Thespian glare are one or two streets where a Spanish-American colony has huddled for a little tropical warmth in the nipping North.  The centre of life in this precinct is “El Refugio,” a cafe and restaurant that caters to the volatile exiles from the South.  Up from Chili, Bolivia, Colombia, the rolling republics of Central America and the ireful islands of the Western Indies flit the cloaked and sombreroed senores, who are scattered like burning lava by the political eruptions of their several countries.  Hither they come to lay counterplots, to bide their time, to solicit funds, to enlist filibusterers, to smuggle out arms and ammunitions, to play the game at long taw.  In El Refugio, they find the atmosphere in which they thrive.

In the restaurant of El Refugio are served compounds delightful to the palate of the man from Capricorn or Cancer.  Altruism must halt the story thus long.  On, diner, weary of the culinary subterfuges of the Gallic chef, hie thee to El Refugio!  There only will you find a fish—­bluefish, shad or pompano from the Gulf—­baked after the Spanish method.  Tomatoes give it color, individuality and soul; chili colorado bestows upon it zest, originality and fervor; unknown herbs furnish piquancy and mystery, and—­but its crowning glory deserves a new sentence.  Around it, above it, beneath it, in its vicinity—­but never in it—­hovers an ethereal aura, an effluvium so rarefied and delicate that only the Society for Psychical Research could note its origin.  Do not say that garlic is in the fish at El Refugio.  It is not otherwise than as if the spirit of Garlic, flitting past, has wafted one kiss that lingers in the parsley-crowned dish as haunting as those kisses in life, “by hopeless fancy feigned on lips that are for others.”  And then, when Conchito, the waiter, brings you a plate of brown frijoles and a carafe of wine that has never stood still between Oporto and El Refugio—­ah, Dios!