And then a big black man on the pavement opens his mouth wide, nigger-like, and laughs at something till you can hear him half-a-mile, pretty near it; which it is the first sure-enough laugh I has heard since I hit New York. And right on top of that I catches the smell of fat meat frying somewheres. I just naturally can't stand it no longer. Anyhow, if I'm predestinated to be lost in New York City it's better I should be lost amongst my own kind, which talks my native language, rather than amongst plumb strangers. I give the conductor the high sign and I says to him, I says: "Cap'n, lemme off, befo' I jumps off!" So he rings the signalling bell and she stops and lets me off. And verily, before I has went hardly any distance at all, somebody hails me. I is wandering along, sort of miscellaneous, looking in the store windows and up at the tops of the buildings, when a brown-complected man steps up to me and sticks out his hand and he says: "Hello thar', Alfred Ricketts!--whut you doin' so fur 'way frum ole Lynchburg?" I says to him he must a-made a mistake. And he says: "Go on 'way, boy, an' quit yore foolin'! This is bound to be Alfred Ricketts 'at I uster know down in Lynchburg, Furginia. Leas'wise, ef 'tain't him it's his duplicate twin brother." I tells him no, my name ain't Alfred Ricketts--it's Jeff Poindexter from Paducah, and I ain't never been in no place called Lynchburg in my whole life as I knows of. He looks at me a minute in a kind of an onbelieving way and then he says he begs my pardon, but his excuse is that I'm the exact spit-and-image of this here Alfred Ricketts, which he says he's done played with him many's the time, when they was both boys together. He says he ain't never in all his born days seen two fellows which they wasn't no kin to each other and yet looked so much similar as him and me does. He says the way we favors each other is absolutely unanimous. He asks me to tell him again what my name is and I does so, and then he says to me: "Whar'bouts you say you hails frum?" I says: "Paducah--tha's whar." He shakes his head kind of puzzled. "Paducah?" he says. "I ain't never heared tell of it. Whar is it--Tennessee or Arkansaw?"