They groped about in the topsy-turvy taxicab, rummaged among a jumble of suitcases, handbags, umbrellas and minor _impedimenta_, and fished out a small dog-basket with an inverted dog inside. Snoozleums was ridiculous in any position, but as he slid tail foremost from the wicker basket, he resembled nothing so much as a heap of tangled yarn tumbling out of a work-basket. He was an indignant skein, and had much to say before he consented to snuggle under his mistress' chin. About this time the chauffeur came prowling into view. He was too deeply shocked to emit any language of the garage. He was too deeply shocked to achieve any comment more brilliant than: "That mess don't look much like it ever was a taxicab, does it?" The young man shrugged his shoulders, and stared up and down the long street for another. The young woman looked sorrowfully at the wreck, and queried: "Do you think you can make it go?" The chauffeur glanced her way, more in pity for her whole sex than in scorn for this one type, as he mumbled: "Make it go? It'll take a steam winch a week to unwrap it from that lamppost." The young man apologized. "I oughtn't to have yelled at you." He was evidently a very nice young man. Not to be outdone in courtesy, the chauffeur retorted: "I hadn't ought to have turned me head." The young woman thought, "What a nice chauffeur!" but she gasped: "Great heavens, you're hurt!" "It's nuttin' but a scratch on me t'umb." "Lend me a clean handkerchief, Harry." The young man whipped out his reserve supply, and in a trice it was a bandage on the chauffeur's hand. The chauffeur decided that the young woman was even nicer than the young man. But he could not settle on a way to say to it. So he said nothing, and grinned sheepishly as he said it. The young man named Harry was wondering how they were to proceed. He had already studied the region with dismay, when the girl resolved: "We'll have to take another taxi, Harry." "Yes, Marjorie, but we can't take it till we get it." "You might wait here all night wit'out ketchin' a glimp' of one," the chauffeur ventured. "I come this way because you wanted me to take a short cut." "It's the longest short cut I ever saw," the young man sighed, as he gazed this way and that. The place of their shipwreck was so deserted that not even a crowd had gathered. The racket of the collision had not brought a single policeman. They were in a dead world of granite warehouses, wholesale stores and factories, all locked and forbidding, and full of silent gloom. In the daytime this was a big trade-artery of Chicago, and all day long it was thunderous with trucks and commerce. At night it was Pompeii, so utterly abandoned that the night watchmen rarely slept outside, and no footpad found it worth while to set up shop.