ing wood and coal up the back
stairs of Mrs. Jackson, in return for which the lady ministered to him
in her professional capacities. At their first important session on a
rainy Saturday of leisure she trimmed and polished each of his ten
finger-nails, told his past, present and future--he was going to cross
water and there was a dark gentleman he had need to beware of--and
suggested that his feet might need attention.

He squirmingly demurred at this last operation, and successfully
resisted it. But the bonds of their friendship were sealed over a light
collation which she served. She was a vegetarian, she told him. You
couldn't get on to a high spiritual plane if you ate the corpses of
murdered animals. But her food seemed sufficing and she drank beer which
he brought her in a neat pitcher from the cheerful store on the corner
where they sold such things. Beer, she explained to him, was a strictly
vegetable product, though not the thing for growing boys. The young must
discriminate, even among vegetables.

They liked each other well and in a little time he had absorbed the
simple tale of her activities. When you rented rooms, people sometimes
left without paying you. So had gone Professor de Lavigne, the
chiropodist; so had vanished the original Madam Wanda. They had left
their signs, and nothing else. The rest was simple after you had been
seeing how they did it--a little practice with a nail-file, a little
observation of parties that came in with crepe on, to whom you said,
"Standing right there I see some one near and dear to you that has
lately passed on to the spirit land"; or male parties that looked all
fussed up and worried, to whom you said that the deal was coming out all
right, only they were always to act on their first impulse and look out
for a man with kind of brownish hair who carried a gold watch and
sometimes wore gloves. She said it was strange how she could "hit it"
sometimes, especially where there were initials in the hats they left
outside in the hall, or a name inside the overcoat pocket. It was
wonderful what she had been able to tell parties for a dollar.

Bean cared little for these details, but he was excited by the theory
back of them; a world from which the unseen spirits of the dead will
counsel and guide us in our daily affairs if we will listen. It was a
new terror added to a world of terrors--they were all about you,
striving with futile hands to touch you, whispering words of cheer