The Grinder Papers — page 49: what you’re looking at

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

44 THE GRINDER PAPERS. a though mebbe ef I hadn’t remembered my manners I’d have got along better; for while 1 was wavin’ my hand and invitin’ ___her to call on me to Sary’s, off I slipped, as flat as a pancake, in = ‘the mud. Ef York mud wasn’t like a feather bed I’d have been killed ; but, lawful suz, as it was, I was as ef I’d been plastered, and they got a broom and swept me off before they'd let me get In the wagon agin. When I did get in I was most jolted to aoe and the flour At stuck to me where I had been dipped in the mud. So’t I made up my mind to go straight hum and wait'till Sary got over her sulks and could go along with me to Barnum’s. When I got to Broadway I knowed I could find Sary’s, fot all the stages run past her corner. But it so happened the baker didn’t go clear to Broadway, and when he sot me down, he says: ‘‘Just go straight ahead and youll come to it all sate, and get into the fust stage you see.” So ahead I went, and soon came to a street with the names all askew on the lamp-posts, and fixed so mortal eyes couldn't read ‘em, for all the world as if it.was suthin in the pockets of them — as fixed ’em to bewilder strangers. Seemed to me it looked like Broadway, though, so I turned into it. | a "Twas horrid dirty, and every house that wasn’t a rum shop | ~ was a pawnbroker’s, and most of the population was a heap : _- darker complected than my poor barber, and the helt of * em x tipsy. , I hadn’t gone far before I came to the conclusion ‘twasn’t Broadway after all, and I cut down a cross street, and went on walkin’ until, lo and behold, I saw a stage standin’ beforeabig