isco until she was sixteen, when
her father was induced to visit his adopted daughter and take his
youngest martyr with him. Isabel had planned for this visit throughout
six long months, and arrived in the city of her heart radiant in a frock
every breadth of which was new--heretofore her wardrobe had risen like
an apologetic ph[oe]nix from the moth-eaten remnants of her mother's old
finery--and such uncompromising trust in the benevolence of fate as a
girl rarely knows twice in a lifetime. There were three days of
enchanted prowling about the old house on Russian Hill, where, as the
tenant, in the rocking-chair by the bedroom window, did not invite her
to enter, she consoled herself with the views and the memories; and of
an even more normal delight in the shopping streets and gay restaurants
of a real city. After that the visit existed in her mind with the
confused outlines of a nightmare.

Her adopted sister's peevish complaints at being obliged to remain in
the foggy windy city all summer, the crying baby, the whirlwinds of dust
and shivering nights, she might have dismissed as unworthy the spirit of
sixteen, and dreamed herself happy. But Mr. Otis, who had been sober for
seven months, selected this occasion for a fall which resounded from
Market Street to Telegraph Hill, and rejuvenated the long line of
saloons that had graced Montgomery Street since the days when "Jim" Otis
had been one of the wildest spirits in the wildest city on earth. That
was "back in the Sixties," when his lapses were as far apart as they
were unrivalled in consumption, span, and pyrotechny. By the late
Eighties he had disappeared into the north, and the careless city knew
him no more.

During the Seventies and early Eighties there had been a period of
reform, incident upon his marriage with a pretty and high-spirited girl,
and one of the city's estimable attempts to clean out its political
stables. His brilliant and desperate encounter with Boss Buckley was
historic, but its failure, and the indifference of the gay contented
majority to the city's underworld, soured him and struck a fatal blow at
the never vital roots of personal ambition. When he began to water the
roots at his old haunts, the finish of his career and of his splendid
inheritance passed into the region of problems that Time solves so
easily. When she solved his problem he was glad to subside into one of
his cottages in Rosewater. Here he reformed and collapsed, reformed an