Then up into the garden stumbled the man from Topaz City, Nevada.  The gloom of the solitary sightseer enwrapped him.  Bereft of joy through loneliness, he stalked with a widower’s face through the halls of pleasure.  Thirst for human companionship possessed him as he panted in the metropolitan draught.  Straight to the New Yorker’s table he steered.

The New Yorker, disarmed and made reckless by the lawless atmosphere of a roof garden, decided upon utter abandonment of his life’s traditions.  He resolved to shatter with one rash, dare-devil, impulsive, hair-brained act the conventions that had hitherto been woven into his existence.  Carrying out this radical and precipitous inspiration he nodded slightly to the stranger as he drew nearer the table.

The next moment found the man from Topaz City in the list of the New Yorker’s closest friends.  He took a chair at the table, he gathered two others for his feet, he tossed his broad-brimmed hat upon a fourth, and told his life’s history to his new-found pard.

The New Yorker warmed a little, as an apartment-house furnace warms when the strawberry season begins.  A waiter who came within hail in an unguarded moment was captured and paroled on an errand to the Doctor Wiley experimental station.  The ballet was now in the midst of a musical vagary, and danced upon the stage programmed as Bolivian peasants, clothed in some portions of its anatomy as Norwegian fisher maidens, in others as ladies-in-waiting of Marie Antoinette, historically denuded in other portions so as to represent sea nymphs, and presenting the tout ensemble of a social club of Central Park West housemaids at a fish fry.

“Been in the city long?” inquired the New Yorker, getting ready the exact tip against the waiter’s coming with large change from the bill.

“Me?” said the man from Topaz City.  “Four days.  Never in Topaz City, was you?”

“I!” said the New Yorker.  “I was never farther west than Eighth Avenue.  I had a brother who died on Ninth, but I met the cortege at Eighth.  There was a bunch of violets on the hearse, and the undertaker mentioned the incident to avoid mistake.  I cannot say that I am familiar with the West.”

“Topaz City,” said the man who occupied four chairs, “is one of the finest towns in the world.”

“I presume that you have seen the sights of the metropolis,” said the New Yorker, “Four days is not a sufficient length of time in which to view even our most salient points of interest, but one can possibly form a general impression.  Our architectural supremacy is what generally strikes visitors to our city most forcibly.  Of course you have seen our Flatiron Building.  It is considered—­”

“Saw it,” said the man from Topaz City.  “But you ought to come out our way.  It’s mountainous, you know, and the ladies all wear short skirts for climbing and—­”

“Excuse me,” said the New Yorker, “but that isn’t exactly the point.  New York must be a wonderful revelation to a visitor from the West.  Now, as to our hotels—­”