NEW YORK CITY
Mr. Edmund Hornung was in New York several days over Sunday.
That's where they travel fast, I'm telling you.
SILAS (in a whisper)—"Did you git a peep at the underworld at all while you wuz in New York, Ezry?"
EZRA—"Three times! Subway twice an' ratscellar once."
"I see New York did considerable begging for one of those reserve banks."
"What of it?"
"Oh, nothing, New York used to dictate."
CUBIST TEACHER—"Can anyone give an impressionistic definition of New York?"
BRIGHT PUPIL—"A small body of limousines almost entirely surrounded by Fords."
FIRST SOUTHERNER—"Were you in New York long enough to feel at home?"
SECOND SOUTHERNER—"Yes, sir; why, I got so I could keep my seat in the cars with a lady standing and not even think about it."
An Ohio newspaper editor spent a few days in New York, and while there somebody asked him how he liked the big town.
"I care for it very little," replied the editor. "Did you ever think of this: Suppose you lived in New York and wanted to go fishing. Where would you go to dig a can of worms?"
"I hear you want a room clerk."
"No, we never have any rooms. What we want is a clerk who can satisfy people in assigning them to billiard tables, telephone booths and cots in the halls."
The surging crowd along Broadway
Was stirred so strangely yesterday.
It stood on tiptoe, eyes aglow,
It stared, and turned to whisper low
Of wonders such as seldom pass
That way. What swayed the living mass?
What marvel from the fabled isles
That drew the eye from Paris styles?
A street car left the track perhaps?
Two bootblacks nabbed for shooting craps?
A fire to call the engines out?
A skidding auto turned about?
A homebrew Bacchus' raisin dance?
At these perhaps the crowd would glance
But never act like this at all.
Amazed, I asked a copper tall
And broad, and heard at last;
A horse and buggy just went past.
—Roland D. Johnson.
An English novelist took his first look at Broadway aflame with light. He read the flashing and leaping signs and said: "How much more wonderful it would be for a man who couldn't read."
UNCLE EZRA—"Eph Hoskins must have had some time down in New York."
UNCLE EBEN—"Yep. Reckon he traveled a mighty swift pace. Eph's wife said that when Eph got back and went into his room he looked at the bed, kicked it, and said, 'What's that darn thing for?"—Judge.
After Mark Twain had been in New York for five years, he wrote to his folks back home that he was the loneliest man in the world!
"What!" exclaimed his people, "in New York and lonely!"
"Yes," wrote Mark; "I'm the only man in this town that doesn't touch a drop."
TEACHER—"Do you know the population of New York?"
MAMIE BACKROW—"Not all of them, ma'am, but then, we've only lived here two years."—Puck.