lars too
much. White man give fifty dollars--takee Olooya all same."

UNDER THE EAVES

The assistant editor of the San Francisco "Daily Informer" was going
home. So much of his time was spent in the office of the "Informer" that
no one ever cared to know where he passed those six hours of sleep which
presumably suggested a domicile. His business appointments outside the
office were generally kept at the restaurant where he breakfasted and
dined, or of evenings in the lobbies of theatres or the anterooms of
public meetings. Yet he had a home and an interval of seclusion of which
he was jealously mindful, and it was to this he was going to-night at
his usual hour.

His room was in a new building on one of the larger and busier
thoroughfares. The lower floor was occupied by a bank, but as it was
closed before he came home, and not yet opened when he left, it did not
disturb his domestic sensibilities. The same may be said of the next
floor, which was devoted to stockbrokers' and companies offices, and was
equally tomb-like and silent when he passed; the floor above that was a
desert of empty rooms, which echoed to his footsteps night and morning,
with here and there an oasis in the green sign of a mining secretary's
office, with, however, the desolating announcement that it would only
be "open for transfers from two to four on Saturdays." The top floor
had been frankly abandoned in an unfinished state by the builder, whose
ambition had "o'erleaped itself" in that sanguine era of the city's
growth. There was a smell of plaster and the first coat of paint about
it still, but the whole front of the building was occupied by a long
room with odd "bull's-eye" windows looking out through the heavy
ornamentations of the cornice over the adjacent roofs.

It had been originally intended for a club-room, but after the ill
fortune which attended the letting of the floor below, and possibly
because the earthquake-fearing San Franciscans had their doubts of
successful hilarity at the top of so tall a building, it remained
unfinished, with the two smaller rooms at its side. Its incomplete and
lonely grandeur had once struck the editor during a visit of inspection,
and the landlord, whom he knew, had offered to make it habitable for him
at a nominal rent. It had a lavatory with a marble basin and a tap of
cold water. The offer was a novel one, but he accepted it, and fitted up
the apartment with some cheap second-hand furnitur