A favourite dodge to get your story read by the public is to assert that it istrue, and then add that Truth is stranger than Fiction. I do not know if theyarn I am anxious for you to read is true; but the Spanish purser of the fruitsteamer El Carrero swore to me by the shrine of Santa Guadalupe that hehad the facts from the U. S. vice-consul at La Paz—a person who could notpossibly have been cognizant of half of them.
As for the adage quoted above, I take pleasure in puncturing it by affirmingthat I read in a purely fictional story the other day the line:“‘Be it so,’ said the policeman.” Nothing so strangehas yet cropped out in Truth.
When H. Ferguson Hedges, millionaire promoter, investor and man-about-New-York,turned his thoughts upon matters convivial, and word of it went “down theline,” bouncers took a precautionary turn at the Indian clubs, waitersput ironstone china on his favourite tables, cab drivers crowded close to thecurbstone in front of all-night cafés, and careful cashiers in his regularhaunts charged up a few bottles to his account by way of preface andintroduction.
As a money power a one-millionaire is of small account in a city where the manwho cuts your slice of beef behind the free-lunch counter rides to work in hisown automobile. But Hedges spent