“Another time I found a five-dollar gold piece in a waistcoat that I bought from a Jap in a big house on Madison Avenue. I went back with it, and told him that he had forgotten the five dollars which I found in the garment. He gave me two dollars and a half and told me that I was a damned fool. I am sure the waistcoat and the money had belonged to his master. “If one wants to take chances, big money can be made in buying old clothes. I have an uncle--he is dead now--peace be with his soul!--who made thousands of dollars. But he was constantly mixed up with the police and had to pay graft on all hands, and lived in perpetual fear that something unfortunate would happen to him. I wouldn’t touch such business. “He went to the Tenderloin and to the bad houses: he knew girls who were living a fast life. He would buy their clothes and their jewelry for next to nothing if they needed money to pay fines in the Night Court, or if they were driven out by the police and had to leave for another dwelling. He would sell those things, perhaps on the same day for a hundred times as much money to other girls who were flush. But the money brought no blessing to him. His son is blind and he himself died of cancer in the hospital, and he was in awful pain to the last moment.” Again I interrupted my visitor, who seemed very generous with his time, and asked him: “But what happens to the things on Baxter Street after you have sold them to the stores?” “They go to the four winds,” he said, pointing characteristically with his upturned thumb. “People buy them and wear them again; dealers from uptown buy the better things and put them in their shops; there are never enough goods on the market. But why don’t you go down to Baxter Street and see for yourself?” The Open Air Exchange on Baxter Street