nd
thereafter down a fire-escape to the side street. A few steps took him
round the corner and into a wide thoroughfare leading directly to the
more important business quarter.

Constans looked about him in wonderment. The high buildings stood
shoulder to shoulder, hemming him in on every side; the street itself
was but a fissure in a mountain-range. The moon had now risen high in
the heavens, and her beams performed odd tricks of shadow play as they
danced through these colossal halls of emptiness and silence. Nothing
seemed real or substantial; these enormous masses of masonry and iron
looked almost dreamlike, the ghosts of a forgotten past, shadows that
must surely vanish with the morning sun.

To sober his imagination, Constans began counting the number of stories
in a sky-scraper that reared its monstrous bulk directly in front of
him. Thirty-six in all, and so higher by half a dozen floors than any of
its neighbors. It should make an excellent observatory, and he
determined upon exploring it.

[Illustration: "CONSTANS LOOKED ABOUT HIM IN WONDERMENT"]

The street doors stood wide open, and the entrance-way was half blocked
up by piles of dust and other refuse blown in from the street by the
winter storms. On the left, as one entered, was the principal suite of
offices; it had been occupied by a banking firm, to judge from the
desk fittings and the long array of safes and vaults. These latter were
open and empty, the doors having been shattered by some powerful
explosive. In all probability the vaults had been closed and locked by
their owners, and had afterwards been looted by the criminals who
thronged the doomed city and who would naturally seek their richest
booty in the financial district. The floor was literally knee-deep in
papers of all description, and in the heap were a number of bundles of
the old-time bank-notes, neatly labelled and banded. These the
plunderers had evidently discarded as beneath their notice, for all that
they represented wealth so vast as to be wellnigh incalculable. With the
Great Change at hand these paper promises had become valueless; only the
precious metals themselves were worth the picking up, and the plunderers
had accordingly made a clean sweep of the specie drawers. It was by the
merest accident that Constans, in kicking aside a pile of elaborately
engraved stock certificates, uncovered two of the smaller gold coins, a
five and ten dollar piece. He put the treasure-trove c