But instead of instantly complying our friend fell into a smiling muse, from which he broke at last to say: "I have long been touched by the pathos of a fact which I believe is not yet generally known. Do you know yourself, with the searching knowledge which is called feeling it in your bones, that a good many Southerners and Southerly Westerners make this town their summer resort?" We intimated that want of penetrating statistics which we perceived would gratify him, and he went on. "They put up at our hotels which in the 'anguish of the solstice' they find invitingly vacant. As soon as they have registered the clerk recognizes them as Colonel, or Major, or Judge, but gives them the rooms which no amount of family or social prestige could command in the season, and there they stay, waking each day from unmosquitoed nights to iced-melon mornings, until a greater anguish is telegraphed forward by the Associated Press. Then they turn their keys in their doors, and flit to the neighboring Atlantic or the adjacent Catskills, till the solstice recovers a little, and then they return to their hotel and resume their life in the city, which they have almost to themselves, with its parks and drives and roof-gardens and vaudevilles, unelbowed by the three or four millions of natives whom we leave behind us when we go to Europe, or Newport, or Bar Harbor, or the Adirondacks. Sometimes they take furnished flats along the Park, and settle into a greater permanency than their hotel sojourn implies. They get the flats at about half the rent paid by the lessees who sublet them, but I call it pathetic that they should count it joy to come where we should think it misery to stay. Still, everything is comparative, and I suppose they are as reasonably happy in New York as I am in my London lodgings in the London season, where I sometimes stifle in a heat not so pure and clear as that I have fled from." "Very well," we said, dryly, "you have established the fact that the Southerners come here for the summer and live in great luxury; but what has that to do with the cheapness of living in New York, which you began by boasting?"