at once flattering to the
judgment of the Conservative Investor, and satisfactory to his highest
interest.

Who inhabit these houses? Well, men who have no better homes--drunken,
idle and shiftless men--strangers in this somewhat inhospitable
town--men looking for work and men looking for mischief--great, hulking,
ignorant brutes whose hope lies in their muscle, and well-formed fellows
with intelligent faces--all sorts and conditions of men--a great tide of
humanity that flows in at night and ebbs out in the morning, never and
yet ever the same. A steadily rising tide? O, yes, perhaps,--but look at
the embankments!

It was curiosity and not a desire to educate myself for the day when I
might become a Conservative Investor that led me to enter No. 99-1/2
Bowery.

Its sign offered attractions suited to almost any purse, the management
apparently catering to every taste in the scale of social refinement.
It read

ROOMS BY THE WEEK $1.25

ROOMS BY THE NIGHT 25c.

BEDS BY THE WEEK 60c.

BEDS BY THE NIGHT 10c.

There were several similar houses in the immediate vicinity, but this
one seemed to secure most of the stragglers who came by during the ten
or fifteen minutes I watched it from the opposite side of the street.
The reasons for its popularity were not to be spelled out of the sign,
so I crossed over and climbed the ladder-like stairs upon which the
street door opened.

I knew just about what was inside before I mounted a step. Everybody
knows who's travelled on the Third Avenue L at night and looked out of
the windows of the train anywhere below Ninth Street.

It was one o'clock in the morning when I left the Club, so it must have
been quite two when I entered the "Columbian," but even at that hour the
smoking-room was more than comfortably filled.

A cloud of malodorous smoke so lowered the ceiling that one
involuntarily stooped to avoid contact with it. Occasionally some
current of air would draw a funnel-shaped drift from this cloud and
whirl it like an inverted sea-spout toward the steam-screened windows
and out of the cracks at their top, and occasionally the draught in the
red-hot stove sucked down a whiff of it. Otherwise it hung motionless
like some heavy, breathless canopy.

A long, narrow table filled the centre of the room, reaching almost from
the windows in the front to the stove in the rear. Around this sat or
lounged a score of men, and perhaps