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Article 1

Genre: Science

The following article titled ‘Unusual ‘sail-backed’ dinosaur roamed Spain 125 million
years ago’, written by Will Dunham, was published in The Scientific American in 2015.

Along a lush river delta in what is now northeastern Spain, a herd of dinosaurs munched on
ferns and conifers similar to modern-day cypresses 125 million years ago.

These creatures stood out from the others in this Cretaceous Period landscape by virtue of
the unusual sail-like structure on their backs, and experts today can only hypothesize about
its function.

Scientists announced on Wednesday the discovery near the town of Morella in Spain's
Castellón Province of the fossil remains of a medium-sized dinosaur they named
Morelladon, a four-legged herbivore that measured 6 metres (20 feet) long.

Protruding from its back was a series of bony spines that formed the sail-like structure that
stood about 2 feet (60 cm) tall.

"The sail could help in heat exchange - thermoregulation - focused on releasing excess body
heat into the environment, like the ears of the modern-day elephants, or as a storage place
for fat to be used during periods of low food supply," said paleontologist Fernando Escaso
of the National University of Distance Education's Evolutionary Biology Group in Spain.

The structure also could have served a display role in attracting mates, Escaso added.

Escaso noted that sail-like structures appeared periodically in the evolutionary history of
vertebrates, often in animal groups not closely related to one another.
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Another plant-eating dinosaur called Ouranosaurus with similarities to Morelladon lived

about the same time in Africa. The biggest sail-backed creature was Spinosaurus, which
lived a semi-aquatic lifestyle 95 million years ago in Africa. At 50 feet long (15 metres) and
7 tons, it was the biggest dinosaur predator on record, larger even than Tyrannosaurus rex.

Millions of years before the rise of the dinosaurs, there were other sail-backed creatures
including the carnivorous reptile Arizonasaurus, the amphibian Platyhystrix and the distant
mammal relatives Dimetrodon and Edaphosaurus.

Morelladon is known from a partial skeleton including the spines, other vertebrae, pelvic
bones, a thigh bone and teeth.

Northeastern Spain during Morelladon's time alternated between wet and dry periods, with
strong temperature variations ranging from 40 degrees Fahrenheit (4 Celsius) to about 104 F
(40 C).

Escaso said the main predator in the area was Baryonyx, a relative of Spinosaurus, and there
were other plant-eating dinosaurs around as well as crocodilians and the flying reptiles
called pterosaurs.

Article 2

Genre: Science

This article titled ‘So you’re too ethical to eat meat; but should cows go extinct?’, written
by Neil Levy, was published in Aeon Essays in 2018.

Vegetarianism and veganism are becoming more popular. Alternative sources of protein,
including lab-grown meat, are becoming available. This trend away from farmed meat-
eating looks set to continue. From an environmental perspective and a welfare perspective,
that’s a good thing. But how far should we go? Would it be good if the last cow died?

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Many people value species diversity. Very many feel the pull of the intuition that it’s
a bad thing if a species becomes extinct. In fact, we sometimes seem to value the species
more than we value the individual members. Think of insects, for example. The life of a fly
might be of trivial value, but each fly species seems considerably more valuable (despite the
lack of any direct instrumental value to us of flies). Do we – should we – value cattle?
Should we be concerned if cows (or a subspecies of cows) is threatened with extinction?
Should we take steps to preserve them, just as we take steps to conserve pandas and
wolves?

There is a distinct difference between cattle on the one hand, and pandas and wolves on the
other. Modern cattle owe their existence to selective breeding by human beings: they are
very different animals from the wild oxen from which they are descended. We might think
that this difference is relevant to their moral value. We might think, that is, along the
following lines: we have a duty to preserve the natural world as far as we can. Wolves and
pandas belong to that natural world; they occupy their place in it due to the mechanisms of
evolution. So we have a duty to preserve them (not an absolute duty of course: rather one
duty among many others – to our children, to each other, and so on – each of which makes
different and sometimes conflicting demands on us).

But cows don’t belong to the natural world, because they owe their existence to our
selective breeding, not evolution. For that reason, we might think, we have no duty to
preserve them as a species: what we created we may dispose of.

I think that something along the lines of this distinction between the products of unguided
selection and selective breeding might shape our intuitions. I suspect that many of us find it
intuitive that it’s not nearly as bad to lose a distinctively domestic species such as cattle as it
is to lose pandas or wolves (maybe even flies). That’s my intuition, anyway. But I doubt
that this intuition is a reliable guide to how we should act.

While most of us want to draw a distinction between the natural and the artificial, it’s
actually very hard (and perhaps impossible) to draw it in a way that is principled. In this

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particular case, the distinction between cattle, our creations, and some other species seems
to depend on separating us, their creators, from the natural world in a way that is
unjustifiable. It is true that cattle are the kind of animals they are as the result of selection
pressures from us, but that’s what our choices are: selection pressures. One species of
animal exerts selection pressure on another all the time. Prey animals have a number of
different characteristics as adaptations for escaping predators; the oxpecker bird lives
exclusively on the food it can extract from large mammals, and so on. The exertion of
selection pressure by one species on another is a normal part of evolutionary biology. The
fact that we exert such pressure on cattle doesn’t make us – or them – special.

Of course, there is a difference in how we exert selection pressure on cattle, compared with
how predators exert selection pressure on prey animals. We have deliberately shaped cattle,
while predators have inadvertently shaped prey. We bred cattle so that they would provide
more meat, for example: lions had no plans to make antelope run faster (and would prefer
that they did not). Their features were our goals. But the fact that we make our living in a
way that is heavily dependent on foresight is an extremely interesting fact about the kind of
animal we are, rather than a fact that excludes us from being an animal at all. We exert
selection pressure in one kind of way, because of the kind of animal we are; other animals
exert selection pressures in other kinds of ways, depending on the kinds of creatures they
are.

If we think, as I do, that being cultural is itself an adaptation, a natural feature of human
beings, then we shouldn’t think that the ways in which we are cultural exempt us from
nature, or that the products of our culture are themselves unnatural.

If differences in their origins don’t make a difference to their value as a species, are there
other grounds to think that cattle are less valuable than pandas, wolves or stick insects? I
don’t think that there are. Arguably, some individual animals deserve more protection than
others, due to their capacity to feel pain or to have desires about how they are treated, but
these differences don’t translate into differences in the value of the species (species can
become extinct without killing any individual members, by ensuring that they don’t
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reproduce). So even if individual cows are less valuable than individual pandas,
the species can be just as valuable.

The differences that exist, in how they came to be and in the kinds of animals they are,
don’t seem to translate into differences in species value. Insofar as we have good reason to
preserve species diversity and to prevent extinctions, we should aim to preserve cattle too.
Perhaps a world in which very few small herds of cattle survive (perhaps to serve a small
industry of those who value the ‘authenticity’ of eating meat the way their ancestors did, or
perhaps just so that future generations could get a sense of a past way of life) would be
better than one that completely eliminated cattle.

Article 3

Genre: Social Studies

This article titled ‘Did the living standards improve during the Industrial Revolution?’,
written by The Editorial Board,was published in The Economist in 2013.

As we showed in a previous blog post, Europe went through a period of astonishing growth
after about 1760. The level of income that Europe has today could not have been reached
without the Industrial Revolution.

In fact, people often refer to two revolutions (though historians bicker about terminology).
The First Industrial Revolution was about the introduction of machines, often powered with
water or steam. It lasted from roughly 1760 to 1850. The Second Industrial Revolution used
more advanced technologies, such as the internal combustion engine and electricity. It
lasted from roughly 1850 to 1910.

We know that the Industrial Revolution made Europe rich. But what was it like to live
through it? Britain has the most complete historical records when it comes to this kind of
thing, so this post will focus on that country.

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The question boils down to how you measure living standards. Historians are divided over
what happened to wages during the Industrial Revolution. Everyone agrees that they did
increase; the question is, when.

Research focuses on real wages—wages that are adjusted for inflation. Getting data on
wages is tricky. But accounting for inflation is even harder. (For example, workers often
paid rent informally, meaning that there are few records around).

And so it is unsurprising that researchers differ in their estimations of real wages. Some,
such as Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson, suggest that full-time earnings for British
common labourers, adjusted for inflation, more than doubled in the seventy years after
1780. But Charles Feinstein argued that over the same period, British real wages only
increased by around 30%. It’s a bit of an academic mess.

Most people agree that after about 1840, real wages did better. Nicholas Crafts and Terence
Mills shows that from 1840 to 1910, real wages more than doubled. Their findings are
mirrored by other researchers (see below right). Improvements may be due to technological
innovation, which led to big increases in labour productivity and hence higher wages.
Others reckon it is because the cost of living did not increase so fast. And the massive
economic impact of the Napoleonic Wars—where, due to naval warfare, exporters suffered
and imports were more expensive—gradually wore off.

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So, while the Industrial Revolution ultimately led to big increases in wealth, progress was
unsteady. For much of the period, the average person was not reaping the benefits of
economic change.

So much for wages. Other measures of standard of living should be considered.

There is increased enthusiasm for biological measures of standard of living, such as

people’s height. Height is a useful measure for a number of reasons. It indicates how well
someone is nourished. And people who do less manual labour, or who are less afflicted by
disease, are likely to be taller. A person’s height is not perfectly correlated with their
standard of living—after all, Bill Gates is not a physical giant. But 20-40% of the difference
in height between individuals is determined by environmental factors. And so at an
aggregate level, height data are pretty helpful.

Researchers find height data from different places, including army archives; it is common
practice to measure the stature of new recruits. Data can also be found in school records.
Academics have even consulted records of people transported from England to penal
colonies in Australia.

Some research presents a rather alarming picture. Below is a graph which shows the height
of English soldiers from 1730 to 1850—a period which captures the First Industrial
Revolution.

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There are many different explanations for height declines during this period. Some people
reckon that diseases in cities exploded. Other people think that unsteady economic growth
led to increases in the frequency of unemployment, which had an impact on nutrition. And
growth of agriculture may have lagged behind economic growth—which meant that the
relative price of nutrients increased at a time when transportation was poor and food
preservation was primitive.

Other research has shown that city dwellers tended to be shorter than rural folk, even
though the urbanites were generally richer. Access to food was easier for those living in
rural areas, and so they were better insulated from the effects of harvest failure.

Another paper suggests that it was only in the latter part of the 19th century that growth in
heights took off. Wages rose and advances were made in food safety and public health. And
for the last 150 years, Britain has been on a steady upward path (see below).

You can tell a similar story about life expectancy. The “expectation of life at birth” (its
official name) is calculated by looking at death registrars. If you know the distribution of
ages at which people die, you can work out the most likely age to which people will live.

Once again, the picture is not rosy. For instance, in almost all British cities, mortality
conditions in the 1860s were no better—and were often worse—than in the 1850s. In
Liverpool in the 1860s, the life expectancy fell to an astonishing 25 years. It was not until
the two subsequent decades that rises in life expectancy were found.

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Economic history now has very advanced ways of measuring quality of life. But
quantitative wizardry does not capture the experience of living through such rapid change.
Less maths-y history is needed too. EP Thompson, an English historian, was not a great fan
of numbers. He was more interested in getting inside people’s minds. One of his most
famous papers, published in 1967, tries to understand what it was like for people living
through rapid economic change. As Britain shifted to fully-fledged capitalism, Thompson
reckons that people felt under more pressure to work hard:

Time is now currency: it is not passed but spent.

The English worker in the throes of industrial capitalism was marked by

his regularity, his methodical paying-out of energy, and perhaps also…a repression, not of
enjoyments, but of the capacity to relax in the old, uninhibited ways.

Hard-nosed economic historians (sometimes known as cliometricians) sneer at Thompson’s

style of history. For them, using poems as source material, and writing lyrical sentences—as
Thompson is prone to do—is not good scholarship.

But we need both the number-crunchers and the artsy types if we want to understand the
consequences of economic growth. That is as true today as it was during the industrial
revolution. Wages might be rising, but other social indicators might be doing awfully. This
was highlighted in a recent book, written by Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze, which looks at
India. Economic history is not just about hard economics, but also about how people
experience economic change.
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Article 4

Genre: Social Studies

This passage is an excerpt from the article titled ‘Economics is Quantum’, written by David
Orrell, and was published in Aeon in 2018.

[…] Indeed, in recent years there have been many calls for economics to reinvent itself,
most noticeably from student groups such as the Post-Crash Economics Society, and
Rethinking Economics. In 2017, the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research
Council announced that it was setting up a network of experts from outside economics
whose task it would be to ‘revolutionise’ the field. And there have been countless books on
the topic, including my own Economyths (2010), which called for just such an intervention
by non-economists.

But progress has been slow. Back in 2008, the French physicist and hedge-fund manager
Jean-Philippe Bouchaud wrote the paper ‘Economics Needs a Scientific Revolution’ in the
journal Nature. In late 2017, he provided an update to the Financial Times: ‘Following the
financial crisis, many of us hoped that the economics profession had finally realised that
their models were not representative of how the real economy works, and that their flawed
methods would quickly change. That assumption was wrong.’ He concluded that: ‘If we
don’t embrace new methods of modelling the economy, we will be as blind to the next crisis
as we were to the last one.’

One problem is that, while there have been many demands for a revolution, the exact nature
of the revolution is less clear. Critics agree that the foundations of economics are rotten, but
there are different views on what should be built in its place. Most think that the field needs
more diversity and should be more pluralistic, and feel that the emphasis on economic
growth for its own sake needs to be reconciled both with environmental constraints, and fair
distribution. Many, including Bouchaud, argue that economists need to adopt techniques
from other areas such as complexity theory. There have been attempts to base the subject
more on data than on theory. And, of course, the idea of rational economic man – which
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forms the core of traditional models – should be replaced with something a little more
realistic.

But what if the problems with economics run even deeper? What if the traditional approach
has hit a wall, and the field needs to be completely reinvented? What if, as with 19th-
century physics, the problem comes down to ontology – our entire way of thinking and
talking about the economy?

And what if the metaphorical piece of lead piping that mugged both physics and economics
was in each case exactly the same thing – namely, quantum reality?

For a start: what is economics? If you ask an economist, or look in a textbook, it turns out
that most follow the English economist Lionel Robbins, who wrote in 1932: ‘Economics is
the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce
means which have alternative uses.’ Or as it is often paraphrased, economics is the science
of scarcity.

And if you ask, what is the point of economics – what is it trying to do? – then the typical
answer is to say that economics is about optimising utility. Or as one book put it:
‘Economics is about happiness.’

And finally, if you ask how this is accomplished, you learn that prices correspond to the
intersection of supply-and-demand curves, which represent the utility-maximising
behaviour of selfish rational consumers and producers, whose homogeneous behaviour is
typically modelled using a handful of representative agents, perhaps with various tweaks for
‘bounded rationality’ and so on. The result is a roughly stable and optimal equilibrium.

But something doesn’t add up about these responses. For one thing, if economics is about
solving scarcity and making people happy by optimising prices, then it appears to be doing
a rather poor job. In many countries, inequality has ballooned in recent decades, while
reported happiness levels seem to have peaked some time back in the 1960s. The financial
crisis didn’t make many people happy, except some bankers.

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The price theory assumes that there exist fixed and independent curves that describe supply
and demand, but the reality is that these forces are coupled and in flux – and the idea that
they lead to a stable and optimal equilibrium seems more than a little wobbly.

Even stranger, though, is that in answering these basic questions money hardly seems to be
mentioned – despite the fact that one would think money is at the heart of the subject. (Isn’t
economics about money? Aren’t prices set by using money?) If you look at those textbooks,
you will find that, while money is used as a metric, and there is some discussion of basic
monetary plumbing, money is not considered an important subject in itself. And both
money and the role of the financial sector are usually completely missing from economic
models, nor do they get paid lip service. One reason central banks couldn’t predict the
banking crisis was because their models didn’t include banks.

Economists, it seems, think about money less than most people do: as Mervyn King, the
former governor of the Bank of England, observed in 2001: ‘Most economists hold
conversations in which the word “money” hardly appears at all.’ For example, the key
question of money-creation by private banks, according to the German economist Richard
Werner, has been ‘a virtual taboo for the thousands of researchers of the world’s central
banks during the past half century’. And then there is the mass of complex financial
derivatives, whose nominal value was estimated in 2010 at $1.2 quadrillion, but which is
nowhere to be found in conventional models, even though it was at the root of the crisis.

To sum up, the key tenets of mainstream or neoclassical economics – including such things
as ‘utility’ or ‘demand curves’ or ‘rational economic man’ – are just made-up inventions, no
more real than the crystalline spheres that Medieval astronomers thought suspended the
planets. But real things like money are to a remarkable extent ignored. […]

Throughout its history, money has alternated between these two sides, presenting either as a
virtual system for accounting (clay cuneiforms in ancient Mesopotamia, wooden tally sticks
in early Medieval England, electronic money today), or as a treasured thing (Ancient
Greece and Rome, the gold standard), while retaining the essential characteristics of each.

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The dichotomy is also reflected in our two main theories of money: chartalism, which says
that money represents a virtual debt to the state; and bullionism, which says it boils down to
metal. Most economists ignore the debate and treat money as an inert medium of exchange
with no special properties of its own. The situation therefore resembles the old debate about
whether light was a virtual wave (Aristotle) or a real particle (Isaac Newton). Eventually,
quantum physicists came to the conclusion that light isn’t a particle or a wave, it is both at
the same time. Most people didn’t care, and just worried about keeping the lights on, and so
it is with money.

It is something of a cliché to say that the discrete, dualistic, entangled and uncertain
behaviour of quantum matter challenges every aspect of our commonsense worldview. But
it does not seem quite so bizarre or alienating when viewed from an economic perspective –
in fact, we deal with it every time we go shopping or cash a cheque. The point is not that
quantum mechanics can be viewed as a metaphor for understanding money, but that the
economy is a quantum system in its own right, with its own very real versions of
measurement, indeterminacy and entanglement. An advantage is that these concepts lack
the obscure and confusing nature of their counterparts in physics. You don’t need to be an
Albert Einstein or an Erwin Schrödinger or have a degree in quantum mechanics to know
that value is uncertain, or to understand that tapping your credit card initiates a virtual
money transfer.

The quantum nature of money only comes fully into its own, however, when it interacts
with another delicate quantum system – the one that designed it: our brains.

The most disturbing and weird feature of quantum physics, at least for quantum physicists,
was that it seemed to hold out a role for consciousness. According to the standard
‘Copenhagen interpretation’, a particle such as an electron is described by a mathematical
wave function, whose amplitude at any point describes the probability of finding the
electron at that location. This wave function ‘collapses’ to a certain value during the
measurement process. No one knows how this collapse occurs, but a conscious observer is
usually assumed to be involved, which seemed to undercut the idea of physics as a purely
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objective science. (It tells you something about science that consciousness – the one thing
we all have direct experience of – can be considered disturbing and weird.) It is perhaps
unsurprising then that consciousness, and the way that we pattern our thoughts, seems to
have much in common with quantum physics.

One of the hottest areas in economics, especially since the crisis, has been behavioural
economics, which was founded in the 1970s by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and
Amos Tversky. The most basic lesson of behavioural economics seems to be that making
decisions is hard, so we look for shortcuts. And we are easily influenced when someone –
the state, an advertiser, our social group, or even our own habits – supplies that shortcut.
For example, we prefer to stick with what we know and we dislike change, which explains
why investors often cling on to shares that do nothing but go downhill. Recency bias means
that we put too much weight on new information – like last year’s investment returns – than
older information – such as historical returns. And in general our decisions are shaped by
things such as history and context.

However, while behavioural economists can model these effects, they can do so only on a
case-by-case basis. And a number of scientists believe that the problem is not so much that
people are being irrational; it is just that they are basing their decisions, not on classical
logic, but on quantum logic. After all, quantum systems, such as us, are intrinsically
uncertain and affected by history and context.[…]

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Article 5

Genre: History

The following passage is the famous Gettysburg Address delivered by President Abraham
Lincoln on 19 November1863. This is dot in the middle of the Civil War. This is most likely
not an ad verbatim copy of Lincoln’s address as the original copy is not available. But it is
an officially recognised version.

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation,
conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so
conceived and so dedicated can long endure.

We are met on a great battlefield of that war.

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here
gave their lives that that nation might live.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this
ground.

The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor
power to add or detract.

The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what
they did here.

It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who
fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

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It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us --that from these
honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full
measure of devotion --that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in
vain;that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom;and that government of
the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

Article 6

Genre: Literature

The following short story titled ‘After Twenty Years’ was written by O’ Henry (Pseudonym
used by William Sidney Porter), and was published in 1906.

The cop moved along the street, looking strong and important. This was the way he always
moved. He was not thinking of how he looked. There were few people on the street to see
him. It was only about ten at night, but it was cold. And there was a wind with a little rain in
it.

He stopped at doors as he walked along, trying each door to be sure that it was closed for
the night. Now and then he turned and looked up and down the street. He was a fine-looking
cop, watchful, guarding the peace.

People in this part of the city went home early. Now and then you might see the lights of a
shop or of a small restaurant. But most of the doors belonged to business places that had
been closed hours ago.

Then the cop suddenly slowed his walk. Near the door of a darkened shop a man was
standing. As the cop walked toward him, the man spoke quickly.

“It’s all right, officer,” he said. “I’m waiting for a friend. Twenty years ago we agreed to
meet here tonight. It sounds strange to you, doesn’t it? I’ll explain if you want to be sure

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that everything’s all right. About twenty years ago there was a restaurant where this shop
stands. ‘Big Joe’ Brady’s restaurant.”

“It was here until five years ago,” said the cop.

The man near the door had a colorless square face with bright eyes, and a little white mark
near his right eye. He had a large jewel in his necktie.

“Twenty years ago tonight,” said the man, “I had dinner here with Jimmy Wells. He was my
best friend and the best fellow in the world. He and I grew up together here in New York,
like two brothers. I was eighteen and Jimmy was twenty. The next morning I was to start for
the West. I was going to find a job and make a great success. You couldn’t have pulled
Jimmy out of New York. He thought it was the only place on earth.

“We agreed that night that we would meet here again in twenty years. We thought that in
twenty years we would know what kind of men we were, and what future waited for us.”

“It sounds interesting,” said the cop. “A long time between meetings, it seems to me. Have
you heard from your friend since you went West?”

“Yes, for a time we did write to each other,” said the man. “But after a year or two, we
stopped. The West is big. I moved around everywhere, and I moved quickly. But I know
that Jimmy will meet me here if he can. He was as true as any man in the world. He’ll never
forget. I came a thousand miles to stand here tonight. But I’ll be glad about that, if my old
friend comes too.”

The waiting man took out a fine watch, covered with small jewels.

“Three minutes before ten,” he said. “It was ten that night when we said goodbye here at the
restaurant door.”

“You were successful in the West, weren’t you?” asked the cop.

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“I surely was! I hope Jimmy has done half as well. He was a slow mover. I’ve had to fight
for my success. In New York a man doesn’t change much. In the West you learn how to
fight for what you get.”

The cop took a step or two.

“I’ll go on my way,” he said. “I hope your friend comes all right. If he isn’t here at ten, are
you going to leave?”

“I am not!” said the other. “I’ll wait half an hour, at least. If Jimmy is alive on earth, he’ll
be here by that time. Good night, officer.”

“Good night,” said the cop, and walked away, trying doors as he went.

There was now a cold rain falling and the wind was stronger. The few people walking along
that street were hurrying, trying to keep warm. And at the door of the shop stood the man
who had come a thousand miles to meet a friend. Such a meeting could not be certain. But
he waited.

About twenty minutes he waited, and then a tall man in a long coat came hurrying across
the street. He went directly to the waiting man.

“Is that you, Bob?” he asked, doubtfully.

“Is that you, Jimmy Wells?” cried the man at the door.

The new man took the other man’s hands in his. “It’s Bob! It surely is. I was certain I would
find you here if you were still alive. Twenty years is a long time. The old restaurant is gone,
Bob. I wish it were here, so that we could have another dinner in it. Has the West been good
to you?”

“It gave me everything I asked for. You’ve changed, Jimmy. I never thought you were so
tall.”

“Oh, I grew a little after I was twenty.”

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 19

“Are you doing well in New York, Jimmy?”

“Well enough. I work for the city. Come on, Bob, We’ll go to a place I know, and have a
good long talk about old times.”

The two men started along the street, arm in arm. The man from the West was beginning to
tell the story of his life. The other, with hiscoat up to his ears, listened with interest.

At the corner stood a shop bright with electric lights. When they came near, each turned to
look at the other’s face.

The man from the West stopped suddenly and pulled his arm away.

“You’re not Jimmy Wells,” he said. “Twenty years is a long time, but not long enough to
change the shape of a man’s nose.”

“It sometimes changes a good man into a bad one,” said the tall man. “You’ve been under
arrest for ten minutes, Bob. Chicago cops thought you might be coming to New York. They
told us to watch for you. Are you coming with me quietly? That’s wise. But first here is
something I was asked to give you. You may read it here at the window. It’s from a cop
named Wells.”

The man from the West opened the little piece of paper. His hand began to shake a little as
he read.

“Bob: I was at the place on time. I saw the face of the man wanted by Chicago cops. I didn’t
want to arrest you myself. So I went and got another cop and sent him to do the job. -
JIMMY.”

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