HEART OF THE CITY
seem to include the wife and baby genius and family life are n't exactly guaranteed to develop very successfully together and right there on the dock at the very last sailing moment the little chap had to choose between a small, wailing family and a great big, clapping New York just tem- porarily, you understand, a mere matter of im- mediate expediency ; and families are supposed to keep indefinitely, you know, and keep sweet, too, while everybody knows that New York can go sour in a single night, even in the coldest weather. And just as the youngster was trying to decide, wavering first one way and then the other, and calling on high every moment to the God of all the Russias, the old steamer whistle began to blow, and they rustled him on board, and his wife and the kid pegged back alone to the province where the girl's father lived, and they got snarled up on the way with a band of Cossack soldiers, and the little chap has n't got any one now even as far off as Russia to hamper his musical career. So he's playing jig-tunes to people like us that are trying to forget our own troubles, such as how much we owe our tailors or our milliners. But sometimes they say he screams in the night, and twice he has fainted in the midst of a concert.
"No heart in the city ? No Romance ? Why,
my dear child, this whole city fairly teems with
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