A Graveyard to Let

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Not without reason did the late and great O. Henry refer to New York as Bagdad-on-the-Subway. Any kind of Arabian Nights' adventure can occur there, and very often does.

Indeed, considering the regrettable behaviour of Sir Henry Merrivale in that same subway...

But let us first indicate the paths of several lives which were converging, towards a point of irony, on that very hot afternoon of Monday, July 6th. Sir Henry Merrivale, himself, wearing a tweed cap and a suit of plus fours which would have inspired aesthetic agony even without his corporation or his countenance, arrived on the Mauretania.

The thermometer stood at ninety-eight. The skyline of lower Manhattan loomed in hard sparkle against a sky like milk on the boil. By the time the liner discharged her passengers, at half-past two in the afternoon, Sir Henry Merrivale had been almost too well photographed and interviewed. He held forth on the international situation with such fluency and lack of discretion that even ships' news reporters felt a qualm.

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