“I said, ‘You simply have to get more details, if you want me to write the letter.’ I’m pretty good at that kind of thing, but I like to have something to go by, naturally; it makes them easier--more spontaneous. Nate had been up to the Office; but I didn’t find anything very available in what he’d got there, so we looked up Wellington’s address in the Index, and went round to his room that afternoon. He lived in a little house on Kirkland Street. “It was a perfectly fiendish day; you’ve never been here in February, have you? Well, that’s the time to see dear old Cambridge. It snows and rains most of the day, and then stops to rest and melt a little. There aren’t any sidewalks to speak of--just dirt paths with curbstones that keep the mud and stuff from running off into the street, so you have to walk in it up to your neck, if you want to get anywhere. That’s what did Wellington up, I guess. “The front door of his house was latched, and I was fumbling round under the crape trying to get hold of the bell, when the landlady appeared; you know--it makes me shudder now sometimes, when I think of that gruesome old buzzard of a woman. She was a typical Cambridge landlady,--one of those uncorsetted, iron grey slatterns who lives in a rancid atmosphere of hot soap-suds and never goes to bed; a room-renting old spider who manages to break everything you own, in a listless sort of way, and then writes home to your father that you haven’t paid your bill. This one belonged to the class that looks on death as a social opportunity. She was dressed for the occasion, and greeted each of us with a kind of a soiled smile that made her old face look like a piece of dish-rag.” “Philip dear.” “Well, it did. And then she said in a loud, important whisper,-- “‘He isn’t upstairs; he’s in my parlor,’ and took us in where poor Wellington was. It was all so dreadful, that part of it, that it didn’t seem sad. There were three other bleary old funeral coaches,--more landladies, I suppose,--on a sofa on one side, and a girl with fuzzy, yellow hair, in a rocking-chair, on the other; she was Mrs. Finley’s daughter, I think. I’ve seen her round the Square since. There didn’t seem to be much of anything for us to do; and Nate was awfully embarrassed and uncomfortable, and seemed to fill up most of the space in the horrid plushy little room. But I didn’t like to go away exactly, because it made our coming there at all seem so useless; so I said to Mrs. Finley,--I couldn’t think of anything else,-- “‘Have many of the fellows been in?’