“What is a church?” I asked.

“Oh, I forgot,” says the twenty, “that I was talking to a tenner.  Of course you don’t know.  You’re too much to put into the contribution basket, and not enough to buy anything at a bazaar.  A church is—­a large building in which penwipers and tidies are sold at $20 each.”

I don’t care much about chinning with gold certificates.  There’s a streak of yellow in ’em.  All is not gold that’s quitters.

Old Jack certainly was a gild-edged sport.  When it came his time to loosen up he never referred the waiter to an actuary.

By and by it got around that he was smiting the rock in the wilderness; and all along Broadway things with cold noses and hot gullets fell in on our trail.  The third Jungle Book was there waiting for somebody to put covers on it.  Old Jack’s money may have had a taint to it, but all the same he had orders for his Camembert piling up on him every minute.  First his friends rallied round him; and then the fellows that his friends knew by sight; and then a few of his enemies buried the hatchet; and finally he was buying souvenirs for so many Neapolitan fisher maidens and butterfly octettes that the head waiters were ’phoning all over town for Julian Mitchell to please come around and get them into some kind of order.

At last we floated into an uptown cafe that I knew by heart.  When the hod-carriers’ union in jackets and aprons saw us coming the chief goal kicker called out:  “Six—­eleven—­forty-two—­nineteen—­twelve” to his men, and they put on nose guards till it was clear whether we meant Port Arthur or Portsmouth.  But old Jack wasn’t working for the furniture and glass factories that night.  He sat down quiet and sang “Ramble” in a half-hearted way.  His feelings had been hurt, so the twenty told me, because his offer to the church had been refused.

But the wassail went on; and Brady himself couldn’t have hammered the thirst mob into a better imitation of the real penchant for the stuff that you screw out of a bottle with a napkin.

Old Jack paid the twenty above me for a round, leaving me on the outside of his roll.  He laid the roll on the table and sent for the proprietor.

“Mike,” says he, “here’s money that the good people have refused.  Will it buy of your wares in the name of the devil?  They say it’s tainted.”

“I will,” says Mike, “and I’ll put it in the drawer next to the bills that was paid to the parson’s daughter for kisses at the church fair to build a new parsonage for the parson’s daughter to live in.”

At 1 o’clock when the hod-carriers were making ready to close up the front and keep the inside open, a woman slips in the door of the restaurant and comes up to Old Jack’s table.  You’ve seen the kind—­black shawl, creepy hair, ragged skirt, white face, eyes a cross between Gabriel’s and a sick kitten’s—­the kind of woman that’s always on the lookout for an automobile or the mendicancy squad—­and she stands there without a word and looks at the money.