Against the side-post of the cabinet there
leaned a gaudy umbrella, preserved there as a relic. It appears that
when Pinkerton was about to place Thirteen Star upon the market, the
rainy season was at hand. He lay dark, almost in penury, awaiting the
first shower, at which, as upon a signal, the main thoroughfares became
dotted with his agents, vendors of advertisements; and the whole world
of San Francisco, from the business-man fleeing for the ferry-boat, to
the lady waiting at the corner for her car, sheltered itself under
umbrellas with this strange device: _Are you wet? Try Thirteen Star._
"It was a mammoth boom," said Pinkerton, with a sigh of delighted
recollection. "There wasn't another umbrella to be seen. I stood at this
window, Loudon, feasting my eyes; and I declare, I felt like
Vanderbilt." And it was to this neat application of the local climate
that he owed, not only much of the sale of Thirteen Star, but the whole
business of his advertising agency.

The large desk (to resume our survey of the office) stood about the
middle, knee-deep in stacks of handbills and posters of "Why Drink
French Brandy?" and "The Advertiser's Vade-Mecum." It was flanked upon
the one hand by two female type-writers, who rested not between the
hours of nine and four, and upon the other by a model of the
agricultural machine. The walls, where they were not broken by
telephone-boxes and a couple of photographs--one representing the wreck
of the _James L. Moody_ on a bold and broken coast, the other the
Saturday tug alive with amateur fishers--almost disappeared under
oil-paintings gaudily framed. Many of these were relics of the Latin
Quarter, and I must do Pinkerton the justice to say that none of them
were bad, and some had remarkable merit. They went off slowly, but for
handsome figures; and their places were progressively supplied with the
work of local artists. These last it was one of my first duties to
review and criticise. Some of them were villainous, yet all were
saleable. I said so; and the next moment saw myself, the figure of a
miserable renegade, bearing arms in the wrong camp. I was to look at
pictures thenceforward, not with the eye of the artist, but the dealer;
and I saw the stream widen that divided me from all I loved.

"Now, Loudon," Pinkerton had said, the morning after the lecture,--"now,
Loudon, we can go at it shoulder to shoulder. This is what I have longed
for: I wanted two heads and four arms; and now