You may pay your money and take your choice. The shrewd little newsboys and office-boys who find their way to the short block of Ann street between Park Row and Nassau--the real Grub street of New York--are proving themselves financiers of tomorrow by dickering for sandwiches--"two cents apiece; three for a nickel." They always buy them in lots of three. That is business and business is not to be scorned for a single instant. Or you can pay as high prices in the swagger restaurants downtown as you do in the swagger restaurants uptown--and that is saying much. When lunch-time comes you can suit the inclinations of your taste--and your pocket-book. But the average New Yorker seems to run quite strongly to the peculiar form of lunch-room in which you help yourself to what you want, compute from the markers the cost of your midday meal, announce that total to the cashier, who is perfectly content to take your word for it, pay the amount and walk out. It seems absurd--to any one who does not understand New Yorkers. The lunch-room owners do understand them. New York business men and business boys are honest, as a general thing--particularly honest in little matters of this sort. "It is all very simple," says the manager of one of these big lunch-rooms, who stands beside you for a moment at the entrance of one of his places--it boasts that it serves more than two thousand lunches each business day between eleven and three. "I've been through the whole mill. I've been check boy and oyster man, cashier--now I'm looking out for this particular beanery. Honor among New York business men? There's a lot of it." "And you don't run many risks?" you venture. "Not many here," he promptly replies. "But there was a man in here yesterday, who runs a cafeteria out in Chicago. I was telling him some of the rules of the game here--how when a customer comes in and throws his hat down in a chair before he goes over to the sandwich and coffee counters that chair is his, until he gets good and ready to go. My Chicago friend laughed at that. 'If we were to do that out in my neck-o'-the-woods,' says he, 'the customer would lose his hat.' And the uptown department stores don't take any chances, either. At one of the biggest of them they make the women decide what they will eat, but before they can start they must buy a check--pay in advance, you understand. They've tried the downtown way--and now they take no chances." The floor manager laughs nervously. "It's different with the girls downtown. We've started one quick buffet lunch on the honor plan, same dishes and prices and service as the men's places, but this one is for business girls. They said at first that we wouldn't make good with them--but we're ready to start another within the month. The business girls don't cheat--no matter what their uptown sisters may try to do." * * * * *