ays of one of those many Italian apartment houses just south
of Washington Square and west of Broadway.

This lineman worked on the roof, apparently, for some twenty minutes.
Then he came down again, chatted for a while with the janitor in the
basement, and giving him a cigar, borrowed an eight-foot step-ladder,
for the purpose of scaling some twelve feet of brick wall, where the
adjoining office building towered its additional story above the
apartment-house roof.

If the janitor had been less averse to mounting his five flights of
stairway, or less indifferent as to the nature of the work which took
the busy telegraph official up to his roof, he might, that afternoon,
have witnessed both a delicate and an interesting electrical operation.

For once up on the second roof, and sure that he was under no immediate
observation, the lineman in question carefully unpacked his bag of
tools. His first efforts were directed toward the steel transom which
covered the trapdoor opening out on the roof. This, he discovered with
a grunt of disappointment, resisted even his short, curved steel lever,
pointed at one end, like a gigantic tack-drawer. Restoring this lever
to the bottom of his leather tool-bag, he made his way to the southeast
corner of the building, where a tangle of insulated wires, issuing from
the roof beneath his feet, merged into one compact cable, which, in
turn, entered and was protected by a heavy lead pipe, leading,
obviously, to the street below, and thence to the cable galleries of
Broadway itself.

It took him but a minute or two to cut away a section of this
protecting pipe. In doing so, he exposed to view the many wires making
up an astonishingly substantial cable, for so meager an office
building. He then turned back to his tool-case and lifted therefrom,
first a Bunnell sounder, and then a Wheatstone bridge, of the
post-office pattern, a coil of KK wire, a pair of lineman's pliers, and
a handful or two of other tools. Still remaining in the bottom of his
bag might have been found two small rubber bags filled with
nitroglycerine, a cake of yellow soap, a brace and bit, a half-dozen
diamond-pointed drills, a box of timers, and a coil fuse, three
tempered-steel chisels, a tiny sperm-oil lantern and the steel "jimmy"
which had already been tested against the obdurate transom.

Then, skilfully relaxing the metallic cable strands, he as carefully
graduated his current and attached his sounder, first