Gentlemen, frock-coated, silk-hatted, gardeniaed, sustained the background of the tradition. Children carried lilies in their hands. The windows of the brownstone mansions were packed with the most opulent creations of flora, the sister of the Lady of the Lilies.
     Around a corner, white-gloved, pink-gilled and tightly buttoned, walked Corrigan, the cop, shield to the curb. Danny knew him.
     "Why, Corrigan," he asked, "is Easter? I know it comes the first you're full after the moon rises on the seventeenth of March - but why? Is it a proper and religious ceremony, or does the Governor appoint it out of politics?" Montague Silver, the finest street man and art grafter in the West, says to me once in Little Rock: "If you ever lose your mind, Billy, and get too old to do honest swindling among grown men, go to New York. In the West a sucker is born every minute; but in New York they appear in chunks of roe - you can't count 'em!"
     Two years afterward I found that I couldn't remember the names of the Russian admirals, and I noticed some gray hairs over my left ear; so I knew the time had arrived for me to take Silver's advice.
     I struck New York about noon one day, and took a walk up Broadway. And I run against Silver himself, all encompassed up in a spacious kind of haberdashery, leaning against a hotel and rubbing the half-moons on his nails with a silk handkerchief.
     "'Tis an annual celebration," said Corrigan, with the judicial air of the Third Deputy Police Commissioner, "peculiar to New York. It extends up to Harlem. Sometimes they has the reserves out at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street. In my opinion 'tis not political."
     "Thanks," said Danny. "And say - did you ever hear a man complain of hippopotamuses? When not specially in drink, I mean."
     "Nothing larger than sea turtles," said Corrigan, reflecting, "and there was wood alcohol in that."