"Paresis or superannuated?" I asks him.

"Hello, Billy," says Silver; "I'm glad to see you. Yes, it seemed to me
that the West was accumulating a little too much wiseness. I've been
saving New York for dessert. I know it's a low-down trick to take things
from these people. They only know this and that and pass to and fro and
think ever and anon. I'd hate for my mother to know I was skinning these
weak-minded ones. She raised me better."

"Is there a crush already in the waiting rooms of the old doctor that
does skin grafting?" I asks.

"Well, no," says Silver; "you needn't back Epidermis to win to-day.
I've only been here a month. But I'm ready to begin; and the members of
Willie Manhattan's Sunday School class, each of whom has volunteered to
contribute a portion of cuticle toward this rehabilitation, may as well
send their photos to the _Evening Daily_.

"I've been studying the town," says Silver, "and reading the papers
every day, and I know it as well as the cat in the City Hall knows an
O'Sullivan. People here lie down on the floor and scream and kick when
you are the least bit slow about taking money from them. Come up in my
room and I'll tell you. We'll work the town together, Billy, for the
sake of old times."

Silver takes me up in a hotel. He has a quantity of irrelevant objects
lying about.

"There's more ways of getting money from these metropolitan hayseeds,"
says Silver, "than there is of cooking rice in Charleston, S. C. They'll