tune-seekers reached the door that had been designated by the
advertisement as No. -- Prince Street; and the fiery heat that had been
pouring down during all the earlier part of the day was somewhat
moderated by heavy clouds rising in the West and skimming half the upper
sky, indicating a thunder-storm rapidly approaching. Perhaps Tom Leslie
thought, as he approached the door sacred to the sublime mysteries of
humbug, of the appropriateness of thunder in the heavens and lightning
playing down on the beaten earth--provided he _should_ find the
mysterious woman of the Rue la Reynie Ogniard, who had succeeded in
giving to his frank and bold spirit the only shock it had ever received
from the powers of the supernatural world. Perhaps he felt that for
whatever was to come--melancholy jest or terrible earnest--the bursting
roar of the warring elements would be a fitting accompaniment, to lend
it a little dignity in the one event and to distract the overstrained
attention in the other.

Perhaps he was even a little theatrical in his fancies, and remembered
the crashes of sheet-iron thunder and the blinding blaze of the
gunpowder lightning, that always accompanied the shot-cylinder rain when
Macbeth was seeking the weird sisters for the second time--when the
fearful incantations of "Der Freischutz" were about to be commenced--or
when the ever-ready demon was invoked by Faust, the first printer-devil.
If he had any of these fancies he was in a fair way of being
accommodated; for casting a glance up at the heavens as they approached
the house, he saw that the obscurity was becoming still denser; and more
than once, above the rumble of the carts and omnibuses that made
Broadway one wide earthquake of subterranean noises, he caught a far-off
booming that he knew to be the thunder of the advancing storm, already
playing its fearful overture among the mountains of Pennsylvania.

His companions were too much absorbed by the novelty of their errand,
and a little expressed apprehension on the part of Bell that if the rain
came on and the carriage should not be ready at the exact moment when it
was wanted, her costly summer drapery might run a chance of being wetted
and disordered,--to make any close examination of the outside of the
building at the door of which Leslie rang; and indeed they had not the
same reason for remarking any peculiarities. Leslie saw that it was
certainly the same at which Harding and himself had stood two nights