Judge — March 14, 1914 — page 11: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

N , ‘ NN \ lor Ely Ox fo GNATIUS CRABLEIGH was going the pace. Possessorof “more money than a mule can iy draw,”’ as he expressed it, anda jp bachelor, he had gone through Dee life leisurely, and to all outward appearance decorously, until age began to show in him. All at once he cut loose from sober habit and became one of the boys. A man with even less money than the tonnage necessary to adequately test the draught power of a mule can find amuse- ment in New York and proceed at any rate of speed his fancy dictates, no matter what his age or condition of decrepitude. Not that Ignatius was decrepit. He was built on the solid plan suggested by concrete structures, was still hearty and as lively as his architecture would permit, and got around easily in spite of a face a little on the order of a gargoyle. In his searches for excitement on Broadway and intersecting thoroughfares Ignatius fell in with younger and better-looking blades, and two or three of them accepted him as a boon com- panion, perhaps thinking of the value of contrast. To them he was indifferently ‘‘Ig,"’ ‘‘Nat’’ or ‘‘Crab,’’ as mellow fellow- ship dictated, and none of these familiar titles on their tongues offended him, although he would have resented any greeting that abridged his name from persons who knew only his repu- table history and who had no notion whatever that he was not still a staid person. er the Piper By J. A, WALDRON = Ignatius’s father, a ship- f chandler, was in business a long Hy time during which ship-chan- 7, dlering was profitable, and in- eal vested his money in two or three small farms uptown that in Igna- tius’s time abandoned vegetables for towering apartments. Thus his boast of money was no reflection of a dream. Many a mamma in Fifth Avenue with far more breeding than Ignatius could boast had angled for Ignatius with that attractive bait known as the debutante, but he sniffed and pur- sued his single way until he was set down in the calendar of social futures as a hopeless proposition. Then came a spirit of abandon in society itself, the world began to dance, and Ignatius Crableigh at least figuratively be- gan to dance with it. And strangely his taste led him to the associations noted rather than to affiliation with society, where perhaps he might have had as much fun as he found in the cabarets and at the same time laid the foundations for a House of Crableigh on conventional and approved lines. For the tastes of his companions led to exponents of the tango and other terpsichorean aberrations whose only rights on Fifth Avenue were vested ones to the roadway and the sidewalks. There is no telling what might have happened to Ignatius early in his festive career had he not enjoyed the solicitous care of his valet, Simeon Gay, whose habitual melancholy made comicbooks.com