When he stepped out into the square hall, the scene of the night's revelry, and glanced about him, the crude bareness and reckless disorder that the merciful glow of the gas-light and its attendant shadows had kindly concealed, stood out in bold relief under the white light of the day now streaming through an oval skylight immediately above the piano. The floor was strewn with the various properties of the night's performance--overturned stools, china mugs, bits of lemon-peel, stumps of cigars, and stray pipes; while scattered about under the piano and between the legs of the chairs, and even upon the steps of the staircase, were the pieces of coal which Fog-horn Cranch and Waller, who held the scuttle, had pounded into bits when they produced that wild jangle which had added so much of dignity and power to the bass notes of the Dead Man's Chorus. These cold facts aroused in Oliver a sense of repugnance which he could not shake off. It was as if the head of some jolly clown of the night before had been suddenly thrust through the canvas of the tent in broad daylight, showing the paint, the wrinkles beneath, the yellow teeth, and the coarse mouth. Oliver was about to turn back to Fred's room, this feeling of revolt strong upon him, when his attention was arrested by a collection of drawings that covered almost every square inch of the ceiling. To his astonishment he discovered that what in the smoke of the night before he had supposed to be only hasty sketches scrawled over the white plaster, were in reality, now that he saw them in a clearer atmosphere, effective pictures in pastel, oil, and charcoal. That the basis of these cartoons was but the grimy stain made by the water which had beaten through the rickety sash during the drive and thrash of winter storms, flooding the whitewashed ceiling and trickling down the side-walls in smears of brown rust, did not lessen their value in his eyes. Closer inspection showed him that these discolorations--some round or curved, others straight or angular--had been altered and amended as the signatures indicated by the deft pencils of Waller, Fred, Bowdoin, and the others, into flying Cupids, Dianas, Neptunes, and mermaids fit to grace the ceiling of a salon if properly enlarged; while the up-and-down smears had suggested the opportunity for caricaturing half the boarders of the house. Every fresh leak and its accompanying stains evidently presented a new problem to the painters, and were made the subject of prolonged study and much consultation before a brush was permitted to touch them, the point apparently being to help the discolorations express themselves with the fewest possible touches.