Colonel Telfair and the magazine promoter shook hands.

    Returning a fortnight later, Thacker dropped off a very rocky Pullman at Toombs City. He found the January number of the magazine made up and the forms closed.

    The vacant space that had been yawning for type was filled by an article that was headed thus:

    second message to congress

    Written for

    THE ROSE OF DIXIE

    BY

    A Member of the Well-known

    BULLOCH FAMILY, OF GEORGIA

    T. Roosevelt

    The (so-called) Vallambrosa Apartment-House is not an apartment-house. It is composed of two old-fashioned, brownstone-front residences welded into one. The parlor floor of one side is gay with the wraps and head-gear of a modiste; the other is lugubrious with the sophistical promises and grisly display of a painless dentist. You may have a room there for two dollars a week or you may have one for twenty dollars. Among the Vallambrosa's roomers are stenographers, musicians, brokers, shop-girls, space-rate writers, art students, wire-tappers, and other people who lean far over the banister-rail when the door-bell rings.

    This treatise shall have to do with but two of the Vallambrosians - though meaning no disrespect to the others.

    At six o'clock one afternoon Hetty Pepper came back to her third-floor rear $3.50 room in the Vallambrosa with her nose and chin more sharply pointed than usual. To be discharged from the department store where you have been working four years, and with only fifteen cents in your purse, does have a tendency to make your features appear more finely chiselled.

    And now for Hetty's thumb-nail biography while she climbs the two flights of stairs.

    She walked into the Biggest Store one morning four years before with seventy-five other girls, applying for a job behind the waist department counter.