twenty years of
wandering. Mr. Pitman was dead; the old city called me, and I came. I
had a hundred dollars or so, and I took a house in lower Allegheny,
where, because they are partly inundated every spring, rents are
cheap, and I kept boarders. My house was always orderly and clean,
and although the neighborhood had a bad name, a good many theatrical
people stopped with me. Five minutes across the bridge, and they were
in the theater district. Allegheny at that time, I believe, was
still an independent city. But since then it has allied itself with
Pittsburgh; it is now the North Side.

I was glad to get back. I worked hard, but I made my rent and my
living, and a little over. Now and then on summer evenings I went to
one of the parks, and sitting on a bench, watched the children playing
around, and looked at my sister's house, closed for the summer. It is
a very large house: her butler once had his wife boarding with me--a
nice little woman.

It is curious to recall that, at that time, five years ago, I had
never seen my niece, Lida Harvey, and then to think that only the day
before yesterday she came in her automobile as far as she dared, and
then sat there, waving to me, while the police patrol brought across
in a skiff a basket of provisions she had sent me.

I wonder what she would have thought had she known that the elderly
woman in a calico wrapper with an old overcoat over it, and a pair of
rubber boots, was her full aunt!

The flood and the sight of Lida both brought back the case of Jennie
Brice. For even then, Lida and Mr. Howell were interested in each
other.

This is April. The flood of 1907 was earlier, in March. It had been a
long hard winter, with ice gorges in all the upper valley. Then, in
early March, there came a thaw. The gorges broke up and began to come
down, filling the rivers with crushing grinding ice.

There are three rivers at Pittsburgh, the Allegheny and the
Monongahela uniting there at the Point to form the Ohio. And all three
were covered with broken ice, logs, and all sorts of debris from the
upper valleys.

A warning was sent out from the weather bureau, and I got my carpets
ready to lift that morning. That was on the fourth of March, a Sunday.
Mr. Ladley and his wife, Jennie Brice, had the parlor bedroom and the
room behind it. Mrs. Ladley, or Miss Brice, as she preferred to be
known, had a small part at a local theater that kept a permanent
company. Her husband was in that