and then Mrs. Pilkins died from worry on account of torpid
delivery-waggons--and there you have young Howard Pilkins with
4,000,000; and a good fellow at that. He was an agreeable, modestly
arrogant young man, who implicitly believed that money could buy
anything that the world had to offer. And Bagdad-on-the-Subway for
a long time did everything possible to encourage his belief.

But the Rat-trap caught him at last; he heard the spring snap, and
found his heart in a wire cage regarding a piece of cheese whose
other name was Alice von der Ruysling.

The Von der Ruyslings still live in that little square about which
so much has been said, and in which so little has been done. To-day
you hear of Mr. Tilden's underground passage, and you hear Mr.
Gould's elevated passage, and that about ends the noise in the world
made by Gramercy Square. But once it was different. The Von der
Ruyslings live there yet, and they received _the first key ever made
to Gramercy Park_.

You shall have no description of Alice v. d. R. Just call up in your
mind the picture of your own Maggie or Vera or Beatrice, straighten
her nose, soften her voice, tone her down and then tone her up,
make her beautiful and unattainable--and you have a faint dry-point
etching of Alice. The family owned a crumbly brick house and a
coachman named Joseph in a coat of many colours, and a horse so old
that he claimed to belong to the order of the Perissodactyla, and
had toes instead of hoofs. In the year 1898 the family had to buy
a new set of harness for the Perissodactyl. Before using it they
made Joseph smear it over with a mixture of ashes and soot. It
was the Von der Ruysling family that bought the territory between