l show yer how I kin make _you_ small enough to go in a box without
crampin'! But I only wanted to know where Jim Foster _lived_."

At which the first clerk became perfunctory again, but civil. "A
letter left in his box would get you that information," he said, "and
here's paper and pencil to write it now."

Uncle Billy took the paper and began to write, "Just got here. Come
and see me at"-- He paused. A brilliant idea had struck him; he could
impress both his old partner and the upstarts at the window; he would
put in the name of the latest "swell" hotel in San Francisco, said to
be a fairy dream of opulence. He added "The Oriental," and without
folding the paper shoved it in the window.

"Don't you want an envelope?" asked the clerk.

"Put a stamp on the corner of it," responded Uncle Billy, laying down a
coin, "and she'll go through." The clerk smiled, but affixed the
stamp, and Uncle Billy turned away.

But it was a short-lived triumph. The disappointment at finding Uncle
Jim's address conveyed no idea of his habitation seemed to remove him
farther away, and lose his identity in the great city. Besides, he
must now make good his own address, and seek rooms at the Oriental. He
went thither. The furniture and decorations, even in these early days
of hotel-building in San Francisco, were extravagant and overstrained,
and Uncle Billy felt lost and lonely in his strange surroundings. But
he took a handsome suite of rooms, paid for them in advance on the
spot, and then, half frightened, walked out of them to ramble vaguely
through the city in the feverish hope of meeting his old partner. At
night his inquietude increased; he could not face the long row of
tables in the pillared dining-room, filled with smartly dressed men and
women; he evaded his bedroom, with its brocaded satin chairs and its
gilt bedstead, and fled to his modest lodgings at the Good Cheer House,
and appeased his hunger at its cheap restaurant, in the company of
retired miners and freshly arrived Eastern emigrants. Two or three
days passed thus in this quaint double existence. Three or four times
a day he would enter the gorgeous Oriental with affected ease and
carelessness, demand his key from the hotel-clerk, ask for the letter
that did not come, go to his room, gaze vaguely from his window on the
passing crowd below for the partner he could not find, and then return
to the Good Cheer House for rest and sustenance. On the fourth day