The office was so old and rattletrap that it was discouraging. The elevator was a slow and wheezy box, bumping and creaking and suggesting immediate collapse. The boards of the entrance-hall and the city editorial room squeaked under one’s feet. The city reportorial room, where I should work if I secured a place, was larger than that of the _Globe_ and higher-ceiled, but beyond that it had no advantage. The windows were tall but cracked and patched with faded yellow copy-paper; the desks, some fifteen or twenty all told, were old, dusty, knife-marked, smeared with endless ages of paste and ink. There was waste paper and rubbish on the floor. There was no sign of either paint or wallpaper. The windows facing east looked out upon a business court or alley where trucks and vans creaked all day but which at night was silent as the grave, as was this entire wholesale neighborhood. The buildings directly opposite were decayed wholesale houses of some unimportant kind where in slimsy rags of dresses or messy trousers and shirts girls and boys of from fourteen to twenty worked all day, the girls’ necks in summer time open to their breasts and their sleeves rolled to their shoulders, the boys in sleeveless undershirts and tight-belted trousers and with tousled hair. What their work was I forget, but flirting with each other or with the reporters and printers of this paper occupied a great deal of their time. The city editor, H. B. Wandell, was one of those odd, forceful characters who because of my youth and extreme impressionability perhaps and his own vigor and point of view succeeded in making a deep impression on me at once. He was such a queer little man, so different from Mitchell and McCullagh, nervous, jumpy, restless, vigorous, with eyes so piercing that they reminded one of a hawk’s and a skin so swarthy that it was Italian in quality and made all the more emphatic by a large, humped, protruding nose pierced by big nostrils. His hands were wrinkled and claw-like, and he had large yellowish teeth which showed rather fully when he laughed. And that laugh! I can hear it yet, a cross between a yelp and a cackle. It always seemed to me to be a mirthless laugh, insincere, and yet also it had an element of appreciation in it. He could see a point at which others ought to laugh without apparently enjoying it himself. He was at once a small and yet a large man mentally, wise and incisive in many ways, petty and even venomous in others, a man to coddle and placate if you were beholden to him, one to avoid if you were not, but on the whole a man above the average in ability.