d the young of the present generation
were of a different cast; but the street seemed not to heed these
changes; indeed it was growing a little careless of itself and needed
replanking. Was it a realization of this fact, I wonder, that caused it
on a sudden to run violently down a steep place into the Bay, as if it
were possessed of Devils? Well it might be, for the human scum of the
town gathered about the base of the hill, and the nights there were
unutterably iniquitous.

O that pale watcher, the Moon! She shone on a rude stairway leading up
to the bare face of a cliff that topped the hill; and five and forty
uncertain steps that had more than once slid down into the street below
along with the wreckage of the winter rains, for the cliff was of rock
and clay and though the rock may stand until the crack of Doom, the clay
mingles with the elements and an annual mud pudding, tons in weight, was
deposited on the pavement of the high street, to the joy of the
juveniles and the grief of the belated pedestrians. The cliff towering
at the junction of the two thoroughfares shared with each its generous
mud-flow and half of it descended in lavalike cascades into the depths
of a ravine that crossed the high street at right angles, passing under
a bridge still celebrated as a triumph of architectural ungainliness.

She shone, my Lady Moon, into that deep ravine which was half filled
with shadow and made a weird picture of the place; it seemed like the
bed of some dark noiseless river, the source of which was still
undiscovered; and as for its mouth, no one would ever find it, or,
finding, tell of it, for the few who trusted themselves to its voiceless
and invisible current were heard of no more; sometimes a sharp cry for
help pierced the midnight silence, and it was known upon the hill that
murder was being done down yonder--that was all. Yet day by day the
great tide of traffic poured through this subterranean passage, with
muffled roar as of a distant sea.

She shone on all that was left of a once beautiful and imposing mansion.
It crowned the very brow of the cliff; it proudly overlooked all the
neighbors; it was a Gothic ruin girded about with a mantle of ivy and
dense creepers, yet not all of the perennial leafage that clothed it,
even to the eaves, could disguise the fact that the major portion of the
mansion had been razed to the ground lest it should topple and go
crashing into that gulf below. There, once upon a time