e, quite inconsistent
with the carved mantels and decorations, and made a fair sitting-room
and bedroom of it. Here, on a Sunday, when its stillness was
intensified, and even a passing footstep on the pavement fifty feet
below was quite startling, he would sit and work by one of the quaint
open windows. In the rainy season, through the filmed panes he sometimes
caught a glimpse of the distant, white-capped bay, but never of the
street below him.

The lights were out, but, groping his way up to the first landing, he
took from a cup-boarded niche in the wall his candlestick and matches
and continued the ascent to his room. The humble candlelight flickered
on the ostentatious gold letters displayed on the ground-glass doors
of opulent companies which he knew were famous, and rooms where
millionaires met in secret conclave, but the contrast awakened only his
sense of humor. Yet he was always relieved after he had reached his own
floor. Possibly its incompleteness and inchoate condition made it seem
less lonely than the desolation of the finished and furnished rooms
below, and it was only this recollection of past human occupancy that
was depressing.

He opened his door, lit the solitary gas jet that only half illuminated
the long room, and, it being already past midnight, began to undress
himself. This process presently brought him to that corner of his room
where his bed stood, when he suddenly stopped, and his sleepy yawn
changed to a gape of surprise. For, lying in the bed, its head upon
the pillow, and its rigid arms accurately stretched down over the
turned-back sheet, was a child's doll! It was a small doll--a banged and
battered doll, that had seen service, but it had evidently been "tucked
in" with maternal tenderness, and lay there with its staring eyes turned
to the ceiling, the very genius of insomnia!

His first start of surprise was followed by a natural resentment of
what might have been an impertinent intrusion on his privacy by some
practical-joking adult, for he knew there was no child in the house.

His room was kept in order by the wife of the night watchman employed
by the bank, and no one else had a right of access to it. But the woman
might have brought a child there and not noticed its disposal of its
plaything. He smiled. It might have been worse! It might have been a
real baby!

The idea tickled him with a promise of future "copy"--of a story with
farcical complications, or even a dramatic end