y the safe thing first. Here's for the shyster!"

There was another struggle in my mind, whether I should even now admit
my knowledge of the Mission Street address. But I had let the favourable
moment slip. I had now, which made it the more awkward, not merely the
original discovery, but my late suppression to confess. I could not help
reasoning, besides, that the more natural course was to approach the
principal by the road of his agent's office; and there weighed upon my
spirits a conviction that we were already too late, and that the man was
gone two hours ago. Once more, then, I held my peace; and after an
exchange of words at the telephone to assure ourselves he was at home,
we set out for the attorney's office.

The endless streets of any American city pass, from one end to another,
through strange degrees and vicissitudes of splendour and distress,
running under the same name between monumental warehouses, the dens and
taverns of thieves, and the sward and shrubbery of villas. In San
Francisco the sharp inequalities of the ground, and the sea bordering on
so many sides, greatly exaggerate these contrasts. The street for which
we were now bound took its rise among blowing sands, somewhere in view
of the Lone Mountain Cemetery; ran for a term across that rather windy
Olympus of Nob Hill, or perhaps just skirted its frontier; passed almost
immediately after through a stage of little houses, rather impudently
painted, and offering to the eye of the observer this diagnostic
peculiarity, that the huge brass plates upon the small and highly
coloured doors bore only the first names of ladies--Norah or Lily or
Florence; traversed China Town, where it was doubtless undermined with
opium cellars, and its blocks pierced, after the similitude of
rabbit-warrens, with a hundred doors and passages and galleries; enjoyed
a glimpse of high publicity at the corner of Kearney; and proceeded,
among dives and warehouses, towards the City Front and the region of the
water-rats. In this last stage of its career, where it was both grimy
and solitary, and alternately quiet and roaring to the wheels of drays,
we found a certain house of some pretension to neatness, and furnished
with a rustic outside stair. On the pillar of the stair a black plate
bore in gilded lettering this device: "Harry D. Bellairs,
Attorney-at-law. Consultations, 9 to 6." On ascending the stairs a door
was found to stand open on the balcony, with this further inscrip