flights of stairs into a cold room, where she desired her
visitor to be seated. She then carefully locked one or two doors
leading into adjoining rooms, put the keys in her pocket, and
departed. Before her exit she made a sly demonstration with her
fists and feet, as if she was disposed to break the truce,
commence hostilities, and punch his unprotected head, without
regard to the laws of honorable warfare. She departed, however,
at last, without violence, though the voyager could hear her
pause on each landing, probably debating whether it wasn't best
after all to go back and thrash him before the opportunity was
lost for ever.

This grand reception-room was an apartment about six feet by
eight; it was uncarpeted, and was luxuriously furnished with six
wooden chairs, one stove, with no spark of fire, one feeble
table, one spittoon, and two coal-scuttles.

The view from the window was picturesque to a degree, being made
up of cats, clothes-lines, chimneys, and crockery, and occasionally,
when the storm lifted, a low roof near by suggested stables. The
odor which filled the air had at least the merit of being
powerful, and those to whose noses it was grateful, could not
complain that they did not get enough of it. Description must
necessarily fall far short of the reality, but if the reader will
endeavor to imagine a couple of oil-mills, a Peck-slip ferry-boat,
a soap-and-candle manufactory, and three or four bone-boiling
establishments being simmered together over a slow fire in his
immediate vicinity, he may possibly arrive at a faint and distant
notion of the greasy fragrance in which the abode of Madame
Prewster is immersed.

For an hour and a half by the watch of the Cash Customer (which
being a cheap article, and being alike insensible to the voice of
reason and the persuasions of the watchmaker, would take its own
time to do its work, and the long hands of which generally
succeeded in getting once round the dial in about eighty minutes)
was this too damp individual incarcerated in the room by the
order of the implacable Madame Prewster.

He would long before the end of that time have forfeited his
dollar and a half and beaten an inglorious retreat, but that he
feared an ambuscade and a pitching-into at the fair hands of the
warlike servant.

Finally, this last-named individual came to the rescue, and
conducted him by a circuitous route, and with half-suppressed
demonstrations of animosity, to the basemen