HE TAKES IN EVERYTHING.
He may be found at horse-races, in billiard-rooms, at cock-fights, at street corners, at hotel doors—and everywhere he is in the way. He has seldom any money in his pocket, and as he must have good clothes, he spends a deal of his time endeavoring to discover tailors who don’t know him, and who put trust in his nickel-plated promises.
This is the most pronounced type of the genus well-dressed loafer, but there are grades. Some work a little, others work a good deal—all spend everything they make on themselves, and exist at the expense of hard-working fathers, mothers, or sisters.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
The reporter makes gossip a business. He knows all the news of the city that is published, and he knows a good deal more that is never published. He asks you when he meets you, “Well, is there anything new?” and expects that you will disgorge all that you have heard that day, even if it concerns a matter that for your own interest had better not obtain publicity. He will think you a very mean man if you conceal from him the fact that your daughter has run away with the milkman, that you yourself have had a quarrel with your wife because she preferred the society of a man who carried a blue bag over his shoulder to that of her husband, or that you are short in your accounts and intend emigrating that night to a land of more salubrious climate than this. If you have had the misfortune to undergo any of these unpleasantnesses, or even others of lesser moment, the inquiring man of letters will feel utterly disgusted and aggrieved if you refuse to let him pluck the heart out of your mystery. If, however, you get the start of him and put the inquiry, “anything fresh?” you have got him. He will probably betray his chagrin by replying that the freshest thing he has seen that day is yourself, or employ some other threadbare witticism to cover his defeat. He will do anything but disclose to you his budget of facts. He probably has in his notebook things that will make the hair on the scalp of the great-headed public stand on end when his paper is issued and strewn broadcast among the people, but no word will he breathe to you of them. He knows that you would tell the first person you met, and thus