XXI
A LITTLE LOCAL COLOUR
I MENTIONED to Rivington that I was in search of characteristic New York scenes and incidents—something typical, I told him, without necessarily having to spell the first syllable with an “i.”
“Oh, for your writing business,” said Rivington; “you couldn’t have applied to a better shop. What I don’t know about little old New York wouldn’t make a sonnet to a sunbonnet. I’ll put you right in the middle of so much local colour that you won’t know whether you are a magazine cover or in the erysipelas ward. When do you want to begin?”
Rivington is a young-man-about-town and a New Yorker by birth, preference and incommutability.
I told him that I would be glad to accept his escort and guardianship so that I might take notes of Manhattan’s grand, gloomy and peculiar idiosyncrasies, and that the time of so doing would be at his own convenience.
“We’ll begin this very evening,” said Rivington, himself interested, like a good fellow. “Dine with me at seven, and then I’ll steer you up against metropolitan phases so thick you’ll have to have a kinetoscope to record ’em.”
