Some gruntlings were heard from the other side of the partition. Madame Ibanez stood up.
"It's best you gentlemen leave now. Poor Pedro must be very tired."
Pablo Cortez returned to Cuba on the next steamer.
If you ever are hungry while in the neighborhood of Thirty-fourth Street and Seventh Avenue, look up the Ibanezes place. Juanita serves the new guests.
THE LITTLE MAN OF 28TH STREET
Some people call him Signor, but he is better known as "Unique" and many more people call him "Signor Unique." He is a bent little man in a long green Prince Albert coat that was once black. A short gray beard frames a pale face in squashed folds on which squats a flat nose. Bushy, low-arched eyebrows shade two little eyes which move rapidly up and down and in and out of their orbs as move scared little mice in their hole. Such is the appearance of Signor when you meet him in his musty shop littered with bric-a-brac.
On the street his gait is so irregular it suggests that he is vociferating with his legs; that the two limbs are quarreling with the jerking arms and that the four limbs argue each separately with the pavement and the curb stones about things we simple mortals will never understand.
From where and when he came here nobody knows. But all the antiquarians on 28th Street swear—and some of these gentlemen are much older than the antiques they sell—that Signor was there before any of them was born, that his shop is the oldest on the street.