ullman
at Toombs City. He found the January number of the magazine made up
and the forms closed.

The vacant space that had been yawning for type was filled by an
article that was headed thus:

SECOND MESSAGE TO CONGRESS

Written for

THE ROSE OF DIXIE

BY

A Member of the Well-known

BULLOCH FAMILY, OF GEORGIA

T. Roosevelt

THE THIRD INGREDIENT

The (so-called) Vallambrosa Apartment-House is not an apartment-house.
It is composed of two old-fashioned, brownstone-front residences
welded into one. The parlor floor of one side is gay with the
wraps and head-gear of a modiste; the other is lugubrious with the
sophistical promises and grisly display of a painless dentist. You
may have a room there for two dollars a week or you may have one for
twenty dollars. Among the Vallambrosa's roomers are stenographers,
musicians, brokers, shop-girls, space-rate writers, art students,
wire-tappers, and other people who lean far over the banister-rail
when the door-bell rings.

This treatise shall have to do with but two of the Vallambrosians--
though meaning no disrespect to the others.

At six o'clock one afternoon Hetty Pepper came back to her third-floor
rear $3.50 room in the Vallambrosa with her nose and chin more sharply
pointed than usual. To be discharged from the department store where
you have been working four years, and with only fifteen cents in your
purse, does have a tendency to make your features appear more finely
chiselled.

And now for Hetty's thumb-nail biography while she climbs the two
flights of stairs.

She walked into the Biggest Store one morning four years before
with seventy-five other girls, applying for a job behind the waist
department counter. The phalanx of wage-earners formed a bewildering
scene of beauty, carrying a total mass of blond hair sufficient to
have justified the horseback gallops of a hundred Lady Godivas.

The capable, cool-eyed, impersonal, young, bald-headed man whose task
it was to engage six of the contestants, was aware of a feeling of
suffocation as if he were drowning in a sea of frangipanni, while
white clouds, hand-embroidered, floated about him. And then a sail
hove in sight. Hetty Pepper, homely of countenance, with small,
contemptuous, green eyes and chocolate-colored ha