Few, except workmen, or those intimately connected with workmen, frequented Porter Street. You might walk there a whole day long with the assurance you would never meet a brougham or a hansom, a beau or a lady. It was as much out of the line of the fashionable world as Kamtchatka. In Nova Zembla, in Patagonia, in Japan, in Florida, you may meet an English nobleman, an English lady, but in the history of Porter Street it is not recorded that any member of the elegant world wandered there for a hundred years. The first effect of the tremendous crash, caused by the falling of the loft, was to paralyse activity for a short time. The next thing was to create discussion as to the possible source and cause of the crash. The third was to induce speculation as to the fate of anyone who might have been in the tower at the time of the catastrophe. Then slowly, very slowly, those around the place began to realise the fact that someone--a man--more than one man--two men it was thought, of late--one man of old--two men of late--an old man some time ago--a young man latterly, had taken up their residence in that tower. This might account for something of the extraordinary in what had taken place. It might have been that owing to something or other done by these men, this enormous explosion--for so it seemed at first--had occurred. They may have had some object in blowing down the tower, or in some other violent onslaught against its integrity. If this were so, in all likelihood they were both now far beyond the range of any danger which could reach them from the tower. After a while, when speculation had become somewhat methodical and less vague, people began to remember that there was nothing particularly dangerous-looking about either of the men who had taken up their residence in the tower, and that in all probability neither of them had been actuated by any criminal designs. There for a while public opinion stood still, and men began to wonder what was the fate of their fellow-men, whose lives had for some time back been associated in their minds with the existence of the tower. Slowly, gradually, the people who were familiar with Porter Street came to think that possibly the two men, whose appearance had been connected in their minds with that place for some time, had been imperilled or destroyed in the fall of the lofts. For to the outside public it had seemed that nothing less than the fall of the lofts could have produced so great a noise as they had heard. They had not taken into account that the beams of dust which shot across the street and lanes had reached no higher than the first loft, and they had not taken care to conclude that since no dust exuded through the higher windows, the likelihood was that the higher lofts were untouched.