that I could
have her key. The pay was three dollars a week to learners, but Miss
Price, the superintendent, thought I could learn in a week's time, which
opinion the portly gentleman heartily indorsed, and so I allowed him to
enroll my name. He gave me a key, showed me how to "ring up" in the
register at the foot of the stairs, and told me that henceforth I should
be known as "105."

I thanked him in as steady a voice as I could command, and reached the
street door on the stroke of six, just in time to hear my shopmates of
the morrow laughing and scrambling down-stairs in their mad effort to
get away from that which I had been trying to obtain for so many weeks.

The street I stepped into had been transformed. Behind my blurred
vision, as I hurried along, I saw no squalor, no wretchedness now.
Through tears of thankfulness the houses, the streets, and the hurrying
people were all glorified, all transfigured. Everything was right--the
whole world and everybody in it.

Thus I sped homeward on that eventful evening, eager to tell my good
news to Mrs. Pringle, who, I knew, would be glad to hear it. As I drew
near the block where I lived, I became half conscious of something
strange and unusual in the atmosphere; I felt the strange sensation of
being lost, of being in the wrong place. Men and women stood about in
silent knots, and through the deep twilight I felt rather than heard the
deep throbbing of fire-engines. Pressing through the little knots of men
and women, I stood before the red mass of embers and watched the firemen
pour their quenching streams upon the ashes of my lodging-house.

Dazed, stupefied, I asked questions of the bystanders. But nobody knew
anything definite. One man said he guessed a good many lives had been
lost; the woman next to him said she'd heard the number was five.

The houses on both sides were still standing, the windows smashed in,
and the tenants fled. There seemed to be not even a neighbor who might
know of the fate of my lodging-house acquaintance or of my good friend
Mrs. Pringle. I spoke to a policeman. He listened gently, and then
conducted me to a house in Fifteenth Street, where they had offered
shelter for the night to any refugees who might desire it.

The basement of this house had been turned into a dormitory, one
section for the men and the other for the women, who were in greater
number and came straggling in one by one. A man-servant in livery passed
hot coffee and san