And yet this club, typical of so many others in the downtown business heart of Manhattan, is but a cog in the mighty machine of the lunching of the workaday multitudes of downtown. Its doors are closed and lights are out at six o'clock in the evening, save on extraordinary occasions; while most of its hundred or more well-trained waiters go uptown to assist in the dinner and the late supper rushes of the fashionable restaurants in the theater and hotel district. Like most of its compeers, it is an outgrowth of the wonderfully comfortable old Lawyers' Club, which was completely destroyed in the great fire that burned the Equitable Building in January, 1912. From that organization, famed for its noon-day hospitality and for the quality of the folk you might meet between its walls, have sprung many other downtown lunch clubs--the Whitehall, the Hardware, the Manufacturers, the Downtown Association, the new Lawyers--many, many others; almost invariably occupying the upper floors of some skyscraper that has been planned especially for them. These clubs are not cheap. It costs from sixty to a hundred dollars to enter one of them and about as much more yearly in the form of dues. Their restaurant charges are far from low-priced. They are never very exclusive organizations and yet they give to the strain of the workaday New Yorker his last lingering trace of hospitality--the hospitality that has lingered around Bowling Green and Trinity and St. Paul's church-yards since colonial days and the coffee houses. * * * * * Even the hospitality of the genial host seems to end--with the ending of the lunch-hour. As he takes his last sip of _café noir_ he is tugging at his watch. "Bless me," he says, "It is going on three o'clock. I've got that railroad crowd due in my office in fifteen minutes." That is your dismissal. For ninety minutes he has given you his hospitality--his rare and unselfish self. He has put the perplexing details of his business out of his mind and given himself to whatever flow of talk might suit your fancy. Now the hour and a half of grace is over--and you are dismissed, courteously--but none the less dismissed. With your host you descend to the crowded noisome street. He sees you to the subway--gives you a fine warm grasp of his strong hand--and plunges back into the great and grinding machine of business.