The bill for her purchases amounted to about eight dollars, and shortly after, just as a joke, I was sent to her house to collect it. The same thin, sallow, worn-looking woman greeted me at the door. She showed, contrary to my expectations, not the slightest touch of impropriety or dissipation, but—wonder of wonders—when this woman spoke, the sound was liquid music, and the words were followed by a smile so dazzling that one could not help imagining a withered bud suddenly opening into a beautiful flower. She called me Mr. Bill Collector and bade me sit down and have a glass of sherry; then she questioned me about my life. I have been told she lived on, neglected by her daughter, and once attempting suicide, to a drab and commonplace old age; but I prefer to think of her as she was that day, calm and beautiful by some expression within, sitting in the quiet of her drawing-rooms, and showing the most enthusiastic interest in the absurd aspirations of a callow youth. Laura Fair was one of the few superwomen I have ever met. My clerk’s salary was augmented in small ways, and one of the most pleasant was taking the place of the literary and dramatic critic of the _Chronicle_ while he went away for a two months’ vacation. After the performances I used to sneak up to a saloon near the City Hall where Market Street tailed off into nothing, and write my criticisms of the plays over a glass of beer. I remember my chagrin when some of the members of Mrs. Oates’s Opera Bouffe Company hunted out my lair and burst in upon me almost nightly. It was my good fortune to hold down my job at the time of the opening of the Baldwin Theater, and also my good fortune to have saved that structure from burning on the day before its opening. Strange to say, not in my capacity of critic, but that of clerk in the store, I went back of the stage of the new theater to deliver some packages, when I saw a naked gas jet, which was jammed against the wall, with a flame ten feet long running up against unplaned boards. I yelled for the stage hands and ran for a bucket of water. In ten minutes it would have been a roaring holocaust and certain to have destroyed—not only the theater, but the hotel above.