about noon
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 ca n't count 'em ! '' Two years afterward I found that I could n'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 . `` Paresis or superannuated ? '' I asks him .