The following few days were as gold and silver.  Edward Pinkhammer, yet counting back to his birth by hours only, knew the rare joy of having come upon so diverting a world full-fledged and unrestrained.  I sat entranced on the magic carpets provided in theatres and roof-gardens, that transported one into strange and delightful lands full of frolicsome music, pretty girls and grotesque drolly extravagant parodies upon human kind.  I went here and there at my own dear will, bound by no limits of space, time or comportment.  I dined in weird cabarets, at weirder tables d’hote to the sound of Hungarian music and the wild shouts of mercurial artists and sculptors.  Or, again, where the night life quivers in the electric glare like a kinetoscopic picture, and the millinery of the world, and its jewels, and the ones whom they adorn, and the men who make all three possible are met for good cheer and the spectacular effect.  And among all these scenes that I have mentioned I learned one thing that I never knew before.  And that is that the key to liberty is not in the hands of License, but Convention holds it.  Comity has a toll-gate at which you must pay, or you may not enter the land of Freedom.  In all the glitter, the seeming disorder, the parade, the abandon, I saw this law, unobtrusive, yet like iron, prevail.  Therefore, in Manhattan you must obey these unwritten laws, and then you will be freest of the free.  If you decline to be bound by them, you put on shackles.

Sometimes, as my mood urged me, I would seek the stately, softly murmuring palm rooms, redolent with high-born life and delicate restraint, in which to dine.  Again I would go down to the waterways in steamers packed with vociferous, bedecked, unchecked love-making clerks and shop-girls to their crude pleasures on the island shores.  And there was always Broadway—­glistening, opulent, wily, varying, desirable Broadway—­growing upon one like an opium habit.

One afternoon as I entered my hotel a stout man with a big nose and a black mustache blocked my way in the corridor.  When I would have passed around him, he greet me with offensive familiarity.

“Hello, Bellford!” he cried, loudly.  “What the deuce are you doing in New York?  Didn’t know anything could drag you away from that old book den of yours.  Is Mrs. B. along or is this a little business run alone, eh?”

“You have made a mistake, sir,” I said, coldly, releasing my hand from his grasp.  “My name is Pinkhammer.  You will excuse me.”

The man dropped to one side, apparently astonished.  As I walked to the clerk’s desk I heard him call to a bell boy and say something about telegraph blanks.

“You will give me my bill,” I said to the clerk, “and have my baggage brought down in half an hour.  I do not care to remain where I am annoyed by confidence men.”

I moved that afternoon to another hotel, a sedate, old-fashioned one on lower Fifth Avenue.