The meetings of the lodge, when I was admitted to membership, early in 1860, were held in an odd-looking cottonwood building near the corner of Commercial and Eighth streets. And Eighth street, at that time, was out in the country. There were no pavements in those days, and the streets were quagmires. Reaching the lot on which the hall was located, you found the building oddly placed upon its rear half, and approached by an odd-looking cottonwood bridge, spanning a deep ravine, and nearly always in a condition of general dilapidation and decay. Passing over this bridge—and on dark nights it was a passage attended with fear and trembling—you reached the building. Then, oddly still, you had to go around it, to the rear, where an odd, rickety, cottonwood stairway, built on stilts, led to the second story. The steps of this stairway had an odd habit of turning up, unexpectedly, and the victims of this perverse disposition were inclined to declare, in their wrath, that never again, until that infernal old man-trap was fixed, would they attend another lodge meeting. Reaching a platform at the head of the stairway, you passed into the ante-room—a room about as large as a good-sized dry-goods box; and thence made your way into the lodge-room. We confidently believed, in those old days, that it was a comfortable and commodious place. In reality, it was not more than one-third the size of the present lodge-room. It was dimly lighted by coal-oil lamps; its floor was covered with the oddest—not to say the most atrocious—pattern of a carpet ever woven; and the tawdry hangings of ten-cent red-and-blue chintz over the officers’ chairs were agonizing in their cheap affectation of adornment. The walls were rough, and black with smoke, until the lodges finally, in a moment of puffed-up wealth, covered them with wall-paper whose figures must have conveyed to the initiate, when his eyes were first opened to the light, the impression that a house-painter’s apprentice had essayed high art, and ended, in a fit of disgust, by hurling his paint pots and brushes at the canvas. This old lodge room had a roof which, like that of the Arkansas gentleman, didn’t leak when it didn’t rain and couldn’t be mended when it did rain. Some one of the Masonic brethren—who met in the same room—had been prowling about in the loft, and, making a misstep, had left in the ceiling a ragged, yawning hole. This served, for years, to impress outsiders, on occasions like the present, with the suspicion that some mysterious and perhaps awful event had occasioned that break. Repairs were rarely made, for the very excellent reason that the treasury of the lodge, in those days, resembled the pocketbook of a tramp. There was no danger of defalcations, and an official bond was entirely superfluous.