wildly happy. They had never had a
real playhouse before, big enough to live in, and this was quite in
accordance with their ideals. They were "visiting" and "keeping store"
and "cooking," and quarreling, and having a perfectly beautiful time
with their two disreputable dolls, utterly regardless of the shadow of
foreboding and desolation that grew ever thicker as the hours passed,
while the sun slipped down behind the steep stone-battlemented park
opposite, and brought no matting, no furniture, no anything that would
make our little nest habitable for the swiftly coming night.

But when it became too dark for them to see to play, they came
clamorously out to where we stood on the doorstep, still waiting, and
demanded in one breath that we tell them immediately when the things
were coming, where they were to get supper, how we were to sleep, and if
they couldn't have a light.

I was glad that I could give them something. I said that it was pretty
early for a light, but that they should have it. I went in and opened a
gas burner, and held a match to it. There was no result. I said there
was air in the pipes. I lit another match, and held it till it burned
my fingers. There was air in the pipes, I suppose, but there was no gas.
I hurried down to inform the janitor.

She was a stern-featured Hibernian, with a superior bearing. I learned
later that she had seen better days. In fact, I have yet to find the
janitor that _hasn't_ seen better days, or the tenant, either, for that
matter, but this is another digression. She regarded me with
indifference when I told her there was no gas. When I told her that we
_wanted_ gas, she inspected me as if this was something unusual and
interesting in a tenant's requirements. Finally she said:--

"Well, and when did yez order it turned on?"

"Why," I said, "I haven't ordered it at all. I thought----"

"Yez thought you could get it of me, did yez?"

I admitted that this seemed reasonable, but in view of the fact of the
water being turned on, I had really given the matter of gas no
deliberate consideration.

I think she rather pitied my stupendous ignorance. At least she became
more gentle than she had seemed at the start, or than she ever was
afterwards.

She explained at some length that I must go first to the gas office,
leave a deposit to secure them, in case of my sudden and absent-minded
departure from the neighborhood, and ask that a man be sent around to
put in a meter, a