The street doors stood wide open, and the entrance-way was half blocked up by piles of dust and other refuse blown in from the street by the winter storms. On the left, as one entered, was the principal suite of offices; it had been occupied by a banking firm, to judge from the desk fittings and the long array of safes and vaults. These latter were open and empty, the doors having been shattered by some powerful explosive. In all probability the vaults had been closed and locked by their owners, and had afterwards been looted by the criminals who thronged the doomed city and who would naturally seek their richest booty in the financial district. The floor was literally knee-deep in papers of all description, and in the heap were a number of bundles of the old-time bank-notes, neatly labelled and banded. These the plunderers had evidently discarded as beneath their notice, for all that they represented wealth so vast as to be wellnigh incalculable. With the Great Change at hand these paper promises had become valueless; only the precious metals themselves were worth the picking up, and the plunderers had accordingly made a clean sweep of the specie drawers. It was by the merest accident that Constans, in kicking aside a pile of elaborately engraved stock certificates, uncovered two of the smaller gold coins, a five and ten dollar piece. He put the treasure-trove carefully away, but in spite of this promising beginning he was not tempted to proceed further on this golden trail. He had another purpose in view, and so found his way to the principal staircase and began the upward climb. Interminable it seemed, and the sense of loneliness and oppression, which lay heavy on Constans's spirits, increased steadily as he went from one landing to another. Each succeeding story was so precisely like the one he had just left; it was always the same long, marble-paved corridor, with every door and window exactly duplicated. How could living men and women have endured the appalling uniformity of this human beehive? Everywhere, too, were the same recurring evidences of the haste and panic that had characterized the final moments of that terrible hegira. Hats and garments, cash-boxes and account-books, littered the hallways, and were piled in little heaps at the entrances to the elevators--impedimenta that must inevitably be abandoned at the last if life itself were to be saved. And the final tragedy--an elevator cage that had jammed in its ways and so hung fixed between two landings. Its occupants had suddenly found themselves entrapped, with no one to hear or to help. One can fancy the growing uneasiness, the wild amaze, the terror that was afraid of the sound of its own voice. Constans hurried by; he had looked but that once.