We said piously: “Because we always go there on New Year’s Eve.” Someone argued with the taxi driver: “Buddy, how about speeding up the old bus?” The driver said on his own sad note: “Say, listen! It may be Noo Year, an’ de cops is slack fur de night; but I ain’t one er youse souses what gits let off. I got my fam’ly ter t’ink about.” The taxi ran in and out, weaving, between the posts of the Sixth Avenue Elevated. We heard Spencer Mapes say that it would help us if we stopped at one of the all-night Coffee Pot stands. Nicholas said: “So you’re here again? The bad penny. No: what I think you are is the dark angel.” He wagged his head. Eva cried: “Oh, please?” We climbed on high stools and urged the attendant to hurry with the coffee. We decided that the attendant looked as if he took his drinks from the Nedick Orange Juice stall on the corner, and laughed heartily. Nicholas counted the assortment of Eva’s friends reflected in the mirror behind the coffee urn, and counted us as we wavered on our high stools. The attendant apathetically swabbed the counter as we spilled our steaming coffee. It was all in the twenty-four hours of a day; and what to him was a snowy New Year’s Eve but extra slush on the floor? Nicholas asked him: “How many of us do you make it?” The man was not interested; he would check the bill by empty cups. “Strange!” observed Nicholas. “Very strange! In the taxi there were so many legs and arms that I feared we’d brought along the entire party.” Someone down the counter chuckled--a fat man’s chuckle. We discovered it to be our taxi driver, telling about us to a friend who occupied the adjacent stool. Mapes suggested to Eva: “Another cup wouldn’t hurt him.” She said in a stricken voice: “I never before saw him like this.” Mapes reassured her: “His sort of old stock, one might say, do everything to excess; they think it their privilege, don’t they? You remember what you told me he said about food?” She leaned over to me. “I wonder, now, if I told him that?” “Of course you did,” I scolded her. “The thing to find out is what you may have neglected to tell him.” Our poet chanted: “I never saw such an amazing youth as this stage decorator chap! Look here, young Guy--were your parents Little People?” Young Guy pouted. He did not know how to take this poet. Always, he had dreamed of meeting real poets. And this one was bald-headed, and his eyes danced mischievously. “Are you guying me?” The poet went into ecstasies. “Hear him, now! He puns by way of starting the New Year right. Young Guy, where thou goest I will go: you will never lose me.” Said young Guy: “Aw, shucks!” The poet rolled his eyes to where heaven must be lurking above the embossed tin ceiling of the Coffee Pot. He said devoutly: “Thank God for this marvellous New Year’s Eve!” Aghast, someone--I think it was I--said loudly: “It’s the New Year already! Listen!” And the city blew up in hideous noise.