"It's the same," he said, his gaze darting about the scurrying street, pausing now and again to rest on this or that building new to him although already old to Broadway. "It's still the same, and yet it's new--all new.--What's that place, the one over there on the corner?" Holt grudgingly told him. "Fresh?" asked Stainton. "Five years old," said Holt. "And that?--And that?" Again Holt supplied the information thus requested. "I think that New York is alive," said Stainton. "Well, you never thought it was Philadelphia, did you?" "I mean that the city itself is a living thing, a gigantic organism. You know they say a man changes, atom by atom, so that, every seven years, he is a fresh being, and yet remains the same being. I believe that is true of some cities and most of all of New York." Holt slapped him on the back. "Good old Jim!" said Holt. The careless words turned Stainton to matters more personal. "Confound it," he said, only half-good-naturedly, "I wish you wouldn't call me old. I'm not." "Of course," said Holt, "not old. Did I say old? Why, you're younger than ever, and a grand slam younger than I'll ever be again." Stainton regarded this man of thirty-odd with whom, for a short time, he had been once so fast a friend and whom New York had so speedily converted into a corpulent, smug, bald-headed dandy. It would, indeed, be a pity if Stainton at fifty were not younger than Holt at thirty-five. And yet Holt had referred to the prematurely withered Newberry as "Old Newberry" much as he had now spoken of the miner as "Old Stainton"! "Oh, you," said Stainton: "you have reached the age at which a man doesn't object to being called old." The cheerful Holt snorted. "All right," he said. "Now we're just off the Lobster Coast. Let's look about for a harbour and a likely place to eat and hear the sad story of your life." They found it, although it is always a difficult task for a New Yorker to decide which of a hundred anxious restaurants he will at any given time pay to poison him; and, while Stainton's eyes went wide with wonder at the place, Holt, amid the muddy mill-race of his customary talk where bobbed only an occasional chip of clean English, piloted the way into the selected eating and drinking place. It was one of those gilded khans, each more gilded than the last, which, in the neighbourhood of Broadway and Forty-Second Street, spring up like grass beside a country road, last about as long as the grass, and, once gone, are about as long remembered. Here, at a corner table, Holt, within a few minutes, was drinking rapid glasses of Irish whiskey and soda, while Stainton slowly sipped at a glass filled from a half-bottle of champagne. "Now, then," said Holt: "your story. For Heaven's sake have pity on a suffering fellow-creature!" Stainton considered. "Of course," he said, "this is confidential." "Of course." "I shouldn't tell it, George, if it weren't that I had betrayed part of it in a moment of excitement----"