And while you are strolling along the Bowery you may come across an oldish-looking man with a dyed or gray mustache and a suggestion of former rakishness in his seedy clothes and well-preserved silk hat—a man who seems to have outlived his calling, whatever it may have been, and to have been left high and dry with no intimate companionship save that of his own thoughts. It will pay you to get acquainted with this old man, for he belongs to a race which is fast disappearing, the race of old-time American gamblers, of which Bret Harte’s John Oakhurst is the best type to be found in our national fiction. He still survives in the West and South, but here in New York his place has been taken by the new brood of race-track plungers and Hebrew book-makers; and the faro-box from which he used to deal with deft fingers, and the lookout chair from which he was wont in the olden times to watch the progress of the game with quick, searching eyes and impassive face, know him no more.
If you are studying the different dialects of the town, you should make careful notes of this old man’s speech and of the peculiar way in which he uses the present tense in describing bygone happenings. Mr. H. L. Wilson has given us, in his excellent book of stories called Zig-zag Tales, the following delicious bit of dialect, which I quote because it well illustrates what I have said. The words are taken from the lips of the “lookout,” and are addressed in a cautious undertone to the faro-dealer:
“See his nobs there with the moniment of azures? I’m bettin’ chips to coppers that’s Short-card Pete. He’s had his mustache cut off, ’n’ he’s heavier ’n he was ten years ago. He tends bar in Noorleans, in ’68, fer Doc Nagle—ole Doc, you rec’lect—’n’ he works the boats a spell after that. See ’im one night play’n’ bank at Alf Hennesey’s, an’ he pulls out thirty-two solid thousan’; Slab McGarr was dealin’, ’nis duck here makes him turn over the box. See ’im ’nother time at San’tone, ’na little geeser works a sleeve holdout on ’im—one a these here ole-time tin businesses; you never see a purtier gun play ’n he makes—it goes, too; mebbe it was n’swif’! He’s a-pullin’ on that gang; get onto that chump shuffle, will you? Ain’t that a play fer yer life? He ain’t overlookin’ any bets.”
“What are you giving us?” is the contemptuous cry of my young friend from Park Row who has done me the honor to read what I have written. “I know all that about Chinatown and the politicians as well as you do.”
So you do, my young friend, and I have no doubt you know it a great deal better than I do; but I had a double motive in offering you the words of suggestion which you have taken the trouble to follow. In the first place, when the young literary man of limited achievement, referred to in an earlier part of this chapter, obtains an order for an article on “The Coast of Chatham Square,” he will probably come to you to find out where Chatham Square is and at what time they light the gas there: and I am sure you will be glad to help him to the full extent of your knowledge, although you may wonder why the order was given to him instead of to you. In the second place, although the whole of the east side is familiar ground to you, there are plenty of intelligent, well-informed men and women who know very little about what this city contains, and if you will read my next chapter you will learn of the impression which the tenement-house district made upon a certain distinguished gentleman who saw it recently for the first time.
CHAPTER X.
“HE TRUN UP BOTE HANDS!”
One summer evening not very long ago, I saw, to my intense surprise, Mr. Richard Watson Gilder crawl cautiously through the barbed-wire fence which was long ago stretched, with his sanction, across the city at Cooper Union. Once within the tabooed district, the distinguished poet and Century editor cast an apprehensive glance about him and then marched swiftly and resolutely down the Bowery. Late that night I caught another glimpse of him standing in the middle of one of the side-streets that lead to the East River, and gazing thoughtfully at the tops of the tall tenement-houses on either side of him.
I could not help wondering what strange errand had brought him to that crowded quarter of the town, for not many months before one of his own trusted subordinates had blandly informed me that there was nothing in New York to write about, excepting, of course, such phases of its social life as had been portrayed, more or less truthfully and vividly, in the pages of Mr. Gilder’s own magazine.