A Cosmopolite in a Café Part-1

A Cosmopolite in a Café
AT MIDNIGHT THE CAFÉ was crowded. By some chance the little
table at which I sat had escaped the eye of incomers, and two
vacant chairs at it extended their arms with venal hospitality to the
influx of patrons.
And then a cosmopolite sat in one of them, and I was glad, for
I held a theory that since Adam no true citizen of the world has
existed. We hear of them, and we see foreign labels on much
luggage, but we find travellers instead of cosmopolites.
I invoke your consideration of the scene - the marble-topped
tables, the range of leather-upholstered wall seats, the gay company,
the ladies dressed in demi-state toilets, speaking in an
exquisite visible chorus of taste, economy, opulence or art, the
sedulous and largess-loving garçons, the music wisely catering to all
with its raids upon the composers; the mélange of talk and laughter

• and, if you will, the Würzburger in the tall glass cones that bend
  to your lips as a ripe cherry sways on its branch to the beak of a
  robber jay. I was told by a sculptor from Mauch Chunk that the
  scene was truly Parisian.
  My cosmopolite was named E. Rushmore Coglan, and he will
  be heard from next summer at Coney Island. He is to establish a
  new 'attraction' there, he informed me, offering kingly diversion.
  And then his conversation rang along parallels of latitude and longitude.
  He took the great, round world in his hand, so to speak,
  familiarly, contemptuously, and it seemed no larger than the seed
  of a Maraschino cherry in a table-d'hôte grape fruit. He spoke disrespectfully
  of the equator, he skipped from continent to continent,
  he derided the zones, he mopped up the high seas with his
  napkin. With a wave of his hand he would speak of a certain
  bazaar in Hyderabad. Whiff! He would have you on skis in Lapland.
  Zip! Now you rode the breakers with the Kanakas at
  Kealaikahiki. Presto! He dragged you through an Arkansas postoak
  swamp, let you dry for a moment on the alkali plains of his
  Idaho ranch, then whirled you into the society of Viennese archdukes.
  Anon he would be telling you of a cold he acquired in a
  Chicago lake breeze and how old Escamila cured it in Buenos
  Ayres with a hot infusion of the chuchula weed. You would have