TOM RATLER

It was a picture of wonderful beauty, with elements strangely transporting. The sky was clear, with vaporous vestiges of a thunder storm, whose dark draperies of lightning stricken depths lay effectively on the southern horizon; the moon was at its full, and its unimpeded rays burnished the waters of the harbor with a silver splendor. A group of men and women on the upper and forward deck of an incoming steamer were the silent spectators of this scene as the steamer lay anchored towards the New Jersey shore of the harbor of New York in the coming year of grace 2000, and as the lingering spring, with an already lost freshness, was passing into the warmer flushes of the summer. The margins of that great bay which once at such a time had been dark with the clustering volumes of leaves upon the arms of encircling forests, was now girdled with a zone of artificial light. It did not encroach upon the domain of the moon’s regnancy, but it seemed to throb nebulous and soft upon all those shores like a titanic wheel of fire. It represented the last triumph of electrical science. It was an electrification of the air above the cities, and that air was palpitating with shooting wreaths of color that gave, for each changing instant, a new festal brilliancy. The gazers were shocked into an admiring astonishment, which only had an audible expression in murmurs of delight, or took the form of appreciative exclamations.

The particular glory of this crown of illumination over the cities about the harbor was its irregular surface or outline. Above the island of New York it rose far up into the outer spaces, burning with an exquisite rosiness; above Staten Island, where it was carried still higher, the color was a strangely mutable blue, and over the lower regions of Long Island and New Jersey it lay in auroral sheets, that every now and then, with a billowy exhalation, shot up phosphorescent projections that seemed actually to detach themselves, and float away like luminous clouds. It gave a spectral splendor to everything and on the deck of the steamer, and at the feet of the mute on-lookers its reflections for an instant shimmered and vanished. But the moon, unchecked by this terrestrial rival, shone on, and its limpid refulgence on the faintly rippling waters lost none of its charm, in contrast with the schemes of artifice around it. In the penumbral glory dark lines appeared, which may have been unilluminated and cavernous streets, while its changing lustres revealed many a towering turret, especially over Staten Island and New York island, and terraces of light marked the arched bridges and their precipitous piers, over the East and North rivers.

The steamer, whose occupants thought they had arrived at some celestial fairy land, was a coast wise “tramp,” and had steamed from Portland, Maine, with a cargo of stone and lumber. Among its passengers was a sturdy youth from the lumber lands of that state—lumber lands which yet, with decreasing resources, strove to supply the markets—who had stolen away from home, and determined to try the tempestuous and stirring arena of the huge metropolis, that now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, expressing the awfully expanded powers of man over material things, expressed too his illimitable luxury, and held within its area an unfathomable possibility of strife and devastating conflict; a city that had become the centre of the world of thought, confining the seething tides of a radicalism that pushed forward a militant atheism against the still struggling standards of the Church; wherein too lay the ripe and bursting seeds of an ambitious artistry that would scale the heavens and reincarnate the flesh of man in an immortal youth, while it lit all the torches of a brazen defiance of the moral law. Tom Ratler had heard of this tremendous city, and his blood boiled to meet its intoxications and his mind delighted in the dream that he might scale its dazzling heights, and linger long beneath the canopies of its indulgences. He possessed those things which go to make the conquering man, pride, courage, an instinctive readiness in danger, a supple mind, a compelling passion dressed in all the allurements of a strong and noble form, his voice had chime and music in it, and a certain spirited demeanor held attention and enforced respect, and all this not unreasonably yoked with judgment and no inconsiderable self-control.

Tom had been born in the Aroostook country of his native state, and had lived the fresh healthful life of the fields. He had availed himself of the advantages of a high school, had read, and, belonging to a farmer family of excellent reputation and commercial prestige, wore the garb of good manners, and listened to the incentives of good taste. His mother was a woman of exceptional purity of heart, and his father a rugged Ajax skilled in extemporaneous prayer, and not unskillful in hammering an opponent to the ground. Tom was a young giant perfectly moulded. His size did not surpass natural limits of comeliness, but it filled with caution its unlucky antagonist. His face was fair, and the rounded bullet-head not strikingly expressive of scholarship—was sheathed in crisply curled hair like a Grecian Apollo, his mouth broad and ingratiating held an armory of ivory teeth—the charm of all mouths—and his eyes of chestnut, were sweet and tempting, by the side of a straight nose and beneath a just obviously receding forehead which however was a little narrow, while at the union of the nose and forehead, a depression gathered a few lines of tension around these formative kernels of flesh and bone, which, to the phrenologist are the signals of observation.

None among those on the deck of the Barrymore had been more astonished with the miracle of science and loveliness before them than Tom, and he thirsted eagerly to reach this prospect of delectation, and plunge into its weaving web of life confusion and intrigue. As he leaned over the rail gloatingly feeding his eyes on this vision of delight, and somewhat apart from the others, he heard, and then he noticed a movement at the stern of the boat, and on the side, which was followed by the swish of oars and the emergent outlines of a row boat. He ran down the rail and whistled softly. The next instant the row boat was alongside revealed from stem to stern in the moonlight, with one figure in it, a Whitehall fisherman or “dockrat,” who was looking for such chance opportunities of profit as a newly arrived ship afforded in passengers, freight, errands, or—less meritoriously—in “smuggle.” His keen ear had caught the sibilant invitation of Tom, and he quickly brought his little boat immediately beneath that interested person’s observation. Tom whispered to him to “wait,” and then hastily disappeared, returning in a few moments with his modest dress suit case, which vanished as quickly as it had come over the side of the ship, and was unceremoniously succeeded by its owner, the latter making use of a loose rope fastened to the taffrail of the steamer. The row boat shot out into clear water, and Tom then became the object of expostulation and entreaty on the part of his former companions, who no less eagerly than himself, wished to reach the planetary wonder before them. Tom paid slight attention to these remonstrances, and urged his guide to renewed efforts, while he seized an unused pair of oars, and added an impetuous speed to the rocking and arrowy motion.

But Tom’s participation did not last longer than was necessary to bring him closer to the docks of the city. Then he drew in his oars, retired to the stern of the boat, and looked around him. And need he had for he was within the scope of the opalescent marvel, and its stupendous loveliness alternately crushed him with amazement, or roused him to enthusiasm. His position may be understood from a few contemporaneous land-marks.

The dancing row boat lay in that criss-crossed and vexed acre near Governor’s Island, where the quarreling tides of the East and Hudson rivers form a patch of troubled waters. On Tom’s right hand was the island, now kept as a military reservation, but one hundred years later forested and mantled with flowers, marked with paths, and surmounted—in the old Fort Hancock—by a conservatory, while the ancient keep of Castle William still remained, embraced in climbing vines, with its roof converted into a garden of roses. On his left the flaming pharos on Bedlow’s Island still burned, but in the hand of the colossal figure there was no longer an electric star, but she held a torch of flaming gas, whose long, wayward threads of fire the winds now hurried upward, now stretched in horizontal films. Near this dramatic station the immigration buildings on Ellis Island were seen framed in light, and thence northward in all directions, along the great rivers and in the median zone of Manhattan, tall structures climbed upward, now dark by reason of the desertion of their human households, but bathed over their summits with the descending rays of that incredible aurora that filled the air above them. It was yet early evening, and immediately in the foreground of this nocturnal spectacle, was the old Battery park twinkling with lamps, in the intervals of a renewed forestation which made it a dark spot on the water’s edge, yet crisply dipt in a silver bath, that came from the moon, mingled with a penumbral halo that came from the electric arc far above it. Tom could now see the reason for the irregular elevation of the luminous ceiling over the city. It was due to the varying heights of the tall buildings that seemed to climb into the skies.

The refulgence was also not everywhere; he could see that over broad spaces of the peopled shores in Brooklyn and New York black lacunae occurred where the shining curtain was absent. The boat had pushed its way through the strife of waters and was nearing the little Whitehall basin which then as now, afforded a retreat and harbor to the battery boatman. Tom overwhelmed his pilot with a generous fare, and jumped quickly to the landing, hurried up the stone stairs, and was in New York, ready for adventure, not disinclined for mischief, and fully committed to the wayward guidance of his fancies and his fortune. His heart glowed with delight, and his mind leaped forward in anticipations of forming a part in that shifting scene, which had drawn to it the eyes of the world, for here again, as in ancient Rome a tumult of social collisions had arisen, mingling with miscellaneous and picturesque confusion with the last expressions of mechanical and architectural daring, with the fevered promotions of every luxurious taste, with erratic dissipations, and with a mental ferment of scientific and literary and philosophic speculation.

Strangely there reverted to Tom’s mind from out of all his desultory but avid reading the picture of Apollonius of Tyana arriving in Rome in the cruel days of Nero. The book of Mr. Tredwell’s he had picked up among a nondescript collection of odds and ends at a country-side library to which gathered the tailings of private scholarship, the chance offerings of missionary enterprises, an occasional presentation copy from an enterprising publisher, and the discarded extras of a newspaper office. Tom in a restless and skipping manner had scoured these books for diversion, for instruction and as youth will, for intimations, palatable but unhealthy, of the currents of life in the channels where life moves most boisterously and least restrained. Apollonius of Tyana quite caught his fancy. That wandering figure, well furnished with the goods of the world, appropriately screened from danger by a half supernatural grace, wearing the garb of a preacher, and well drilled in local customs, gentle with the bravado of spiritual superiority, and not averse to finding out what the world contained, suited his own dreams of action, though the companionable guardians of Tom’s fate in their seclusion among the stars, might have smiled and shed tears over the hazardous attempt to put Tom Ratler and Apollonius of Tyana in the same category. Tom was not Apollonius, nor was New York in the year 2000, the Rome of the year 50, though filled to the brim with seditious, dissolute, serious and aggressively progressive elements. Tom however—in his own thought—was seeing the world, or about to see it. As he gazed upward that on-coming evening at the dark bulwarks of the shrouded city, intermittently bathed on their summits and then down their cliff-like sides by the aerial and diaphanous glows in the skies, Tom felt the thrill of the unknown advancing towards him, and all his eager senses reached out to receive its message and its gifts.

Nor was Tom a Nigel Olifaunt, the young Lord of Glenvarloch whose adventures in London town at the beginning of the seventeenth century Scott so humorously sets before his readers. He had come upon no errand of restitution; and while his handy hand and emulous spirits might engage him in some unlucky business, and his spirited resentment bring him within the limits of a metropolitan Alsatia he was not likely to become the victim of so unscrupulous a knave as Lord Delgarno, nor run any risk of being tried for treason to the state. If any comparison will help the reader to put Tom Ratler in his proper phase of action let him recall Kenelm Chillingly’s justification of his abrupt departure from his father’s home; “I go in quest of adventure like Amadis of Gaul, like Don Quixote, like Gil Blas, like Roderick Random; like, in short, the only people seeking real life, the people who never existed except in books. I go on foot; I go alone. I have provided myself with a larger amount of money than I ought to spend, because every man must buy experience, and the first fees are heavy.” Tom certainly bore little resemblance to that accomplished cynic, and would have heartily derided—if he understood them—most of his paradoxical conclusions, but like Kenelm he had left home to see the world, and see it, where at the beginning of the twentieth century it presented the most contrasted garniture of forms and sentiments.

Tom noticed that while many persons were walking along the sea wall of the Battery Park, and the settees were occupied by many couples deeply interested in their mutual felicities, and a few families were engaged in animated discussion of their household affairs, prospects, and designs, the larger numbers were gathered around a central point, whence the strains of very enlivening music proceeded. By reason of its elevation, the band—evidently of large proportions—succeeded in conveying these strains to the outskirts of its acoustic domain, where Tom found himself. This concentration permitted him to walk unimpeded around the wall, against the beautiful and shining bay, looking towards monstrous beacons of light on the hills of Staten Island, the shimmering walls of the Narrows and the nimbus of rays that played over the populous shores of Bay Ridge, no longer retained as a semi rural contour on the edge of the Harbor.

Scarcely conscious of any definite intentions, where all around him invited him to continue a delighted and aimless ramble, Tom reached the walls of the Aquarium, now occupying the old foundation of Castle Garden, and, at the distant period to which we transport the reader, yet retained, but immensely heightened and most inordinately ornamented.

Tom could not clearly see the chase of zoological detail over the glistening terra-cotta sides, though salient representations of whales and porpoises, dolphins, tunas, tarpons, sword fish, and sharks were descried by our traveller, whose astonished eyes however were not always well enough informed to report their correct identity. His eyes, bright and eager as they were, quite failed to discern the wealth of marine naturalism, in sea urchins, coral groups, medusas, hydroids, sea-cucumbers, molluscs, which encumbered the ornamentation, mingled with the larger motifs, and luxuriantly clustered at every interval between the swelling and pompous immensity of the cetaceans, and the giant fish.

It was at this spot that Tom had reason to recall with gratitude the agricultural training of his muscles, and to be roughly reminded that the splendid city to which he had come was not unqualified in its apparent possession of peace and order. In going round the circular outskirt of this immense pavilion Tom reached its northern walls approaching the confines of a great basin for the accommodation of motor boats and naphtha launches, small pleasure yachts, and a miscellaneous assortment of less definite water vehicles. Here the shadow of the building was less successfully dispelled by the park lamps, and as Tom turned to leave the angle, prompted to do so by the deficiency of light, three figures seemed to spring from the pavements, and with a consecutive movement too rapid to be easily discerned, to fly at his back and front aiming fist blows at his head and neck, and vicious kicks at his shins.

The most listless admirer of self defense, or the least intrepid of its critics, would have rejoiced to have witnessed the lightning-like metamorphosis in our whilome inert wanderer. His valise dropped from his hand, and the motionless arms—so long and powerfully braced with muscle, multiplied themselves with incredible rapidity in a Briarean thicket of appendages before whose centrifugal violence his assailants quickly vanished. The scuffle attracted some notice not divorced from a desire, on the part of many, to see the stranger worsted, and this sentiment was reinforced by the sudden approach of a policeman entrusted with the wardenship of this quarter. A sullen group of men and boys, vaguely referable to the Syrian section of Washington Street, followed Tom, and their inquisition of his appearance grew less and leas favorable, while a few epithets, accompanied by a chance and unsavory missile in the shape of rotten fruit acquainted him with his unpopularity.

Tom experienced a faint sense of disappointment, but his own warlike instincts, readily aroused, permitted no movement of retreat, and his disdain of his cowardly critics finally prompted him to turn and walk with threatening alacrity towards them. This movement served to disperse them, and as Tom remarked their skulking shapes, he was joined by a much older man who had watched with interest and sympathy the shifting relations of Tom and his tormentors. The stranger spoke, and his measured and pleasant tones fell refreshingly on Tom’s ears, to whom, overwhelmed by the immensity of his new surroundings, the incident had seemed painful and unlucky.

“I see you are quite able to take care of yourself. I was ready to take a hand myself against this bunch of loafers. I guess that you are a new-comer, but don’t misjudge us from this little adventure. The city is fairly orderly, as much so as most large towns, and you can safely ramble over it at any hour of the day or night, without much danger of molestation, though”—here the speaker drew a cigar case from his pocket and handed its open end to Tom who with a slight hesitation engendered by unfamiliarity with smoking, took one of the proffered Wizards, as his new friend continued;—“though in some ways we are dangerously near a domestic conflict much more serious than street brawls or the incivility of hoodlums and nocturnal poachers. Come over to the sea wall and sit down. I don’t wish to presume upon the acquaintance my admiration of your strength has given me, but as an older man and one not indifferently acquainted with the conditions and the opportunities of this city, you may welcome some friendly directions and advice.”

“Indeed, sir” answered Tom now thoroughly interested, if not quite assured as to the honorable intention of his interlocutor, “I should feel grateful for that. I am not a baby, and I believe that I can pull through easily enough, but a few pointers at the outset may save one from dangerous or expensive blunders. What is learned without cost can be used without loss, is an old saying with us in Maine.”

As the two men moved towards the edge of the reservation it was easily seen that Tom surpassed his companion in height, and if this were not a sufficient assurance, any incipient suspicion of danger would have been dispelled by the striking visage of Tom’s acquaintance. He was a man of middle life hardly showing any of the usual symptoms of increasing years. His hair, the weakest defence against time’s encroachments, was yet untouched with gray, his face was unmarred by a single wrinkle, his eyes of a peculiar brilliancy, betokened intelligence and frankness, and the broad mouth, firm and rather narrow lips, the chin perhaps a little too massive, confirmed the unmistakable impression that our young adventurer had fallen in with an unusual man—a man of observation and experience and convictions.

Tom had himself quickly noticed these details and his confidence increased, and even a sudden impulse of affection sprang up in his heart as the momentary sense of his extreme isolation deepened into a half reminiscent sadness. They had come up to one of the many seats facing the bay, and the older man motioning to a bench, cut up into separate seats by iron straps, sat down, while the end of his cigar shone vividly as he puffed away, apparently abstracted, and making no further overtures at conversation. Tom himself had become thoughtful and silent, though he fully expected that the dialogue would be resumed without his encouragement, and his mind dreamingly fell into that mixed revery and consciousness, which overcomes us at such restful moments. The waters before them, dark and viscid in their unctuous flow, with scolloped concavities glazed with the moonlight, lapped softly against the stones of the wall, and the band of music, recoiling from some tempestuous climax, was breathing over them an enticing melody.

It was Tom who first broke the silence between them.

“I suppose I can expect good employment in New York, sir,” he said, yet unwilling to expressly declare his purpose. There was no answer; and Tom looked more inquisitively at his neighbor, fearing that his favorable deductions might have been premature. Again he spoke; “I had a fancy that in this city of rich people I might get a good job as motorist; I understand machinery, have used a steamer myself at home, (as indeed he had), and reading of fair pay given capable men in New York came on for employment.”

His companion woke up, or at least alighted from his soaring meditations, turned a little towards Tom, and without the slightest reference to Tom’s inquiry and declaration, began a deliberate sketch of the social conditions of New York, its political dilemmas, and its industrial power, almost as if, in response to some unheard interrogation, he took advantage of the occasion to deliver himself of a carefully prepared disquisition, though he conferred upon Tom the honor of being the subject of that inaudible question.

“Yes, my friend,” he began, “New York has become the microcosm of the whole world. Here are gathered together the nuclei of every school of thought, every phase of social state is here; the abject poor, the fabulously rich, and the industriously competent. Our population is over sixteen millions. We are spreading to the furthest limits of our territorial domain. Every art is practised here, and here each art secures its highest rewards. Architecture has here risen to its most stupendous and impossible tasks. Music finds here its greatest audiences, and its exhibitions take place in the grandest temples. Painting has here displaced the former superiority of France; factories making every article that human ingenuity or human appetite can invent for its satisfaction or its profit, are here in operation.

“We have become the cynosure of the world, and one million of visitors a year has reversed the tide of curiosity from the old world to the new; because our enormous wealth permits us to build marvels and realize dreams. We have become a state, and this city now possesses its own legislature, and frames laws for its own government. Enormous universities furnish us with learning, and under the impetus of an outrageous intellectualism large classes of our population discard old habits of life, old creeds, old morals, struggling with an impossible ardor to compass the meaning of life in the surfeit of enjoyment and the rhapsodies of speculation. The Catholic Church almost alone upholds the dogmas of the past; Protestantism has deteriorated in Agnosticism, and Agnosticism falls a prey to a devouring melancholy, which councils a happy death, whenever life forgets its pleasures, or Age robs the senses of their uses. Euthanasia, although a forbidden crime as the enemy of the state, is secretly practised and from day to day sumptuous Suicidariums are discovered and destroyed by the police.

“Science makes contributions, to our convenience, but is still dumb on the questions of our purpose and origin. The transmutation of metals is said to be almost discovered, and when gold can be made from lead the tocsin of industrial activity will be sounded, and the social machine, no longer able to maintain financial differences, will run down, and, clotted with a metallic lubricant—no longer serving its just ends,—will stop working, and our social state resolve itself into a primordial protoplasm, whence the savage tribe with chief and slaves, will slowly emerge, and the earth begin over again its tiresome political evolution.

“But just now in this city the questions of policy grow daily more complicated and dangerous. We have a gloriously rich class enjoying the highest culture and withal benevolent, but living in undreamed of splendor, and we have an educated class of operatives and middle men with a proletariat of the very poor, who, often by their own misdirection or proclivities, live stunted and desperate lives. These classes form a vast body proclaiming a radical socialism and their organization grows stronger and stronger with increasing population, for family life, except within stringent limits, is discouraged by the rich, and is despised by the _emancipated_.

“The balance of power will soon fall to the socialist, who lives for breeding, and breeds by living. You have just come to our city (and here the speaker for the first time turned directly to Tom, and involved him directly in his allocution), at the close of a general election for Mayor—the Mayor being the governor of our city-state. It was a hot rancorous contest, and the successful candidate was a compromise, a fusion brought about by the rich classes, the moderately well off, and the Catholic labor vote. The new Mayor’s position is a perilous one. He has hardly a bare majority in the city Legislature. He himself is a dreamer, and over balanced with metaphysical guesses, well trained in psychology, not inexperienced in business, but at best a compromise, chosen to be the tool of the rich, yet constitutionally a believer in some creed about the Brotherhood of Man, and so without absolute direction, and without force; and so also a farce, and a failure. Well—” (here the singular monologue ended, and the speaker, who more and more astounded his absorbed listener, stood up) “Yes—there are good chances for a chauffeur of the right stamp in this city, where over ten per cent. of the accidental deaths occur through motor accidents. Have you any money?”

Tom no longer doubtful as to the integrity of his friend—his rhetorical tirade convinced him that he was some one with reservations of conscience—answered, as he also rose to his feet:

“I have three hundred dollars. Enough?”

The stranger had resumed his musings, looking away in the direction of the Liberty Light whose flaring chords of flame now rose straight into the sky like a contorted and tapering pinnacle of fire;—but he heard; and turning again to Tom he said; “Very good. Go to the Hotel Kohinoor near the Times Square. Get well lodged; Look well; Dress well, and put an advertisement in the New York Times for a position as a chauffeur. Give the hotel address. You will have answers to choose from; mark me! Take my card! I will see you at any time.”

He handed Tom a card, and walked away after cordially shaking his hand, though as he did it, he looked less at Tom, than at the dispersing crowds who, no longer kept together by the band, were dissolving in streams through the Battery grounds.

Tom moved to a lamp and read:

BENTON BRIGGS (Secretary to the Mayor) CITY HALL

Tom of course was duly impressed, and thanked his stars that the assault on him had been made. He placed the card carefully in his pocket book, and proceeded forthwith to find out the location of the Hotel Kohinoor. He found the policeman who had aided in interrupting the machinations of his enemies, and from him was directed to the hotel which his informant assured him; “was the all-firedest most expensive house in town.” Tom perhaps quailed a moment, but he partially divined the philosophy of Mr. Briggs’ advice; he wanted a rich employer, his own qualifications were, he knew, unimpeachable, a little spurious distinction given to him by his handsome quarters would not form a prejudice against him; on the other hand it was intended by his adviser to form a direct appeal to the fastidious personal tastes of the rich employer he was after. He intended to be careful about his advertisement, and he had quite enough reliance upon himself and his good looks to improve a favorable impression.

Ruminating over these things Tom found his way to the Subway which in the year 2000 maintained its supremacy as an artery of travel, and was flashed through its blazing conduit, to Forty-Second Street, where he alighted. The hotel Kohinoor occupied the present combined sites of the Metropole and the Saranac and represented the most munificent expenditure of skill and fancy known to the publican world.

It was the marvel of two continents. The most daring mechanical device had been united with the strangest and most defiant artistic conceptions, and a result roundly denounced by the better taste of the day, was also blazoned and paraded as the consummate expression of the New School, a hackneyed phrase devoted at all periods of art, to give distinction to oddity, if not to the vulgarity of empty display.

It was a monstrous pagoda of stone and stucco, ornamented with extraordinary grotesques of great size, and involved a curious use of colored decoration with surprisingly copious development of electrical illumination. At night the tapering structure, prolonged upward to almost two hundred feet became a shimmering and splendid spire of light by reason of chains of lamps swung from tip to tip of its projecting antennae, each chain from top to bottom being swung, as it were, by a mounting line of grinning goblins and laughing nymphs, rendered in terra-cotta and affixed to the ends of the antennae, which, on each story numbered twelve, making a sort of angulation of the whole building, and these polygonal faces were constructed to form as many façades, and a different treatment was allotted to each in ornamentation and color.

This facetted and rather brilliant composition had suggested the name Kohinoor and, as a term descriptive of scintillation and gem-like glory, it applied well enough to the chromatic and photal encrustation of this singular architecture, whose effrontery of design drew to its doors and rooms the richest and the most eccentric patrons.

The interior arrangement was not less striking nor less effective, limiting that term to the range of ideas expressed in surprise and disordered novelty. It consisted, in outline, of a central air space, or well, reaching to the apical skylight—itself a fantastic medley of colored glasses—conical in form. From the contracting areas of the successive floors, encircled at each floor or story by a gallery, whose edge upon the conical well was protected by a _rococo_ railing of brass, hung aprons of English ivy. The ascending floors were designed as radial spaces with diverging corridors producing rhomboidal rooms, and the corridors opened at their outside limit upon a broad balcony, cut up into stalls, for the occupants of the rooms.

The ground floor, entered from the street by ascending steps, was a labyrinth of columns, arranged in stars, and holding between them groined ceilings luxuriously painted with multitudes of enlacing figures, borrowed from all the stages of life, the personages of history, contemporaneous character, the idols of the theatre the legends of poetry, figures of mythology; an intemperate extravaganza of portraiture, in whose chaotic investiture and train the impudence of the artist had placed politicians in compromising union with goddesses, and mingled the decorum of the pulpit with the bacchanalian antics of the chorus hall. Momentarily it was denounced as a scandal and later it was welcomed as a joke, and at all times it crowded the place with sightseers and gathered to it a spendthrift retinue.

Lounging chairs and sofas of a deep cherry red, imitating coral stems and growths, upholstered in a sea green tapestry, filled the space at convenient intervals, and every hour was signalled by soft utterances of music from a mammoth orchestrion. It was all in bad taste relieved by extreme skill, but from top to bottom of the building, and throughout its details the loosened revelry of libidinous fancy was given full play. For want of a method it chased over the known world for the exotic, the bizarre, the beautiful, and brought them together in all phases of contact, producing a colossal maze of features that could only, with trained artists, react in a monstrous and terrifying weariness. It was principally a marvel of decorative ingenuity, picking from the resources of industry every thing rare and costly. What might have been styled a system of house gardening prevailed within, and patches of flowers were installed in ample vases and bowls, themselves richly conceived and executed, kept alive by artifice, and stimulated by electric shades.

Into this unusual hostelry Tom Ratler came with no inconsiderable trepidation, provoked, and naturally enough, by some apprehensions as to the sufficiency of his pocket book to meet financial requirements which might conform to so marvellous a place.

He found that however, in spite of its splendor, it could afford him in its skyward limits a small room at, if not exactly a small price, no ruinous toll. So he was whisked upward in the elevator tube that, as a steel tube in open work, represented a towering and stupendous palm, extended through the central air-space, with bridges at each floor for the escape of its travellers.

The room was tiny but deliciously neat and, to Tom’s eyes, ravishingly beautiful. It was in enamelled white, with a wall paper that began at the bottom with a flush of white blossoms on a dainty pink ground, and ended at the top in pendent boughs bearing yellow—golden yellow—oranges. The furniture was made from a delicately stained green wood, designed in patterns of rustic simplicity; the windows were shaded by crisp chintz-like curtains, whose figures represented various idylls of the country, from chestnutting to May-day frolics. A soft downy red mat or rug covered the floor, and water colors of charming freshness, delineating the undressed pleasure of the seashore, decorated the walls. A little bath room opened off this fascinating boudoir, and Tom standing in the centre of the bewildering beauty and comfort, dropped his hand valise, whistled softly, and for an instant thought of his own plain bed-room at home, in which, were the reader able to follow our friend’s dream, a well stored book-case, rude but serviceable, occupying an entire wall, brimmingly filled with books of all sizes and on all subjects, would have been revealed.

Tom at once attacked the task of preparing his advertisement. The writing escritoire was supplied with pen, paper, and ink, and a few moments only were necessary for the rough outlining of his “ad” which changed a few times finally took this form;

WANTED—A position as a chauffeur by an experienced driver of automobile cars. References furnished. Address Tom Ratler, Hotel Kohinoor.

Tom again descended the elevator shaft; was directed to the Times newspaper office opposite to the hotel itself, entered his application, and, unwilling to yet trust himself to the throbbing and blazing streets, retired to his exquisite aerie to think of his new surroundings, and to gaze over that carpet of light punctuated with brilliant orbs or crossed by sombre shafts of stone, that like an undulous and phosphorescent scarf floated over and through the Capital of the World.

And to Tom’s musing eyes there seemed to be at times speeding meteors in trained or panoramic succession passing in the sky. And there was. For to all other marvels of the growing years Science had added the partial conquest of the air.