New Orleans had simply gazed down upon him from a balcony.  He could see her pensive, starry eyes and catch the flutter of her fan, and that was all.  Only once he came face to face with her.  It was at dawn, when she was flushing the red bricks of the banquette with a pail of water.  She laughed and hummed a chansonette and filled Raggles’s shoes with ice-cold water.  Allons!

Boston construed herself to the poetic Raggles in an erratic and singular way.  It seemed to him that he had drunk cold tea and that the city was a white, cold cloth that had been bound tightly around his brow to spur him to some unknown but tremendous mental effort.  And, after all, he came to shovel snow for a livelihood; and the cloth, becoming wet, tightened its knots and could not be removed.

Indefinite and unintelligible ideas, you will say; but your disapprobation should be tempered with gratitude, for these are poets’ fancies—­and suppose you had come upon them in verse!

One day Raggles came and laid siege to the heart of the great city of Manhattan.  She was the greatest of all; and he wanted to learn her note in the scale; to taste and appraise and classify and solve and label her and arrange her with the other cities that had given him up the secret of their individuality.  And here we cease to be Raggles’s translator and become his chronicler.

Raggles landed from a ferry-boat one morning and walked into the core of the town with the blase air of a cosmopolite.  He was dressed with care to play the role of an “unidentified man.”  No country, race, class, clique, union, party clan or bowling association could have claimed him.  His clothing, which had been donated to him piece-meal by citizens of different height, but same number of inches around the heart, was not yet as uncomfortable to his figure as those speciments of raiment, self-measured, that are railroaded to you by transcontinental tailors with a suit case, suspenders, silk handkerchief and pearl studs as a bonus.  Without money—­as a poet should be—­but with the ardor of an astronomer discovering a new star in the chorus of the milky way, or a man who has seen ink suddenly flow from his fountain pen, Raggles wandered into the great city.

Late in the afternoon he drew out of the roar and commotion with a look of dumb terror on his countenance.  He was defeated, puzzled, discomfited, frightened.  Other cities had been to him as long primer to read; as country maidens quickly to fathom; as send-price-of-subscription-with-answer rebuses to solve; as oyster cocktails to swallow; but here was one as cold, glittering, serene, impossible as a four-carat diamond in a window to a lover outside fingering damply in his pocket his ribbon-counter salary.