It was a quiet day for all of us, though I got my shopping started, and
at night we met at the hotel and had a lonesome dinner. We was all too
dazed and tired to feel like larking about any, and poor Ben was so
downright depressed it was pathetic. Ever read the story about a man
going to sleep and waking up in a glass case in a museum a thousand
years later? That was Ben coming back to his old town after only
twenty-five years. He hadn't been able to find a single old friend nor
any familiar faces. He ordered a porterhouse steak, family style, for
himself, but he was so mournful he couldn't eat more than about two
dollars' worth of it. He kept forgetting himself in dismal
reminiscences. The onlysright thing he'd found was the men tearing up
the streets. That was just like they used to be, he said. He maundered
on to us about how horse-cars was running on Broadway when he left and
how they hardly bothered to light the lamps north of Forty-second
Street, and he wished he could have some fish balls like the old
Sinclair House used to have for its free lunch, and how in them golden
days people that had been born right here in New York was seen so
frequently that they created no sensation.
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