An automobile swings past and some fine lady, looking out, wakes to bitterness his sense of need. “New York’s tough without the coin, isn’t it? You never get a glance when you’re out of the game. I spend too easy, that’s what’s the matter with me. But I’ll get back, you bet. Next time I’ll know enough to save. I’ll get up again, and next time I’ll stay up, see?” Next year his hopes may be realized again, his dreams come true. If so, be present and witness the glories of radiance after shadow. “Ah, me boy, back again, you see!” “So I see. Quite a change since last season.” “Well, I should smile. I was down on my luck then. That won’t happen any more. They won’t catch me. I’ve learned a lesson. Say, we had a great season.” Rings and pins attest it. A cravat of marvelous radiance speaks for itself in no uncertain tones. Striped clothes, yellow shoes, a new hat and cane. Ah, the glory, the glory! He is not to be caught any more, “you bet,” and yet here is half of his subsistence blooming upon his merry body. _They_ will catch him, though, him and all in the length of time. One by one they come, old, angular misfortune grabbing them all by the coat-tails. The rich, the proud, the great among them sinking, sinking, staggering backward until they are where he was and deeper, far deeper. I wish I could quote those little notices so common in all our metropolitan dailies, those little perfunctory records which appear from time to time in theatrical and sporting and “song” papers, telling volumes in a line. One day one such singer’s voice is failing; another day he has been snatched by disease; one day one radiant author arrives at that white beneficence which is the hospital bed and stretches himself to a final period of suffering; one day a black boat steaming northward along the East River to a barren island and a field of weeds carries the last of all that was so gay, so unthinking, so, after all, childlike of him who was greatest in his world. Weeds and a headboard, salt winds and the cry of seagulls, lone blowings and moanings, and all that light and mirth is buried here. Here and there in the world are those who are still singing melodies created by those who have gone this unfortunate way, singers of “Two Little Girls in Blue” and “White Wings,” “Little Annie Rooney” and “The Picture and the Ring,” the authors of “In the Baggage Coach Ahead” and “Trinity Chimes,” of “Sweet Marie” and “Eileen”--all are here. There might be recited the successes of a score of years, quaint, pleasing melodies which were sung the land over, which even to-day find an occasional voice and a responsive chord, but of the authors not one but could be found in some field for the outcasts, forgotten. Somehow the world forgets, the peculiar world in which they moved, and the larger one which knew them only by their songs.