It was as much the mystery as the horror that made the case of Margaret Clark (commonly known as Old Twentypercent) of such burning interest to the six daily journals of the town. I have been told that the feet of tireless young reporters wore a separate path up the bluff to the site of old Margaret’s abode; but this I question, because there were already two paths made for them by the feet of old Margaret’s customers—the winding path up the grassy slope, and the steps hewn out of the sheer yellow bluff-side, sliced down to make a backing for the street. These are the facts that, whichever the path taken, they were able to glean: Miss Margaret lived on the bluff in the western part of town. The street below crosses at right angles the street running to the river, which is of the kind the French term an “impasse.” It is a street of varied fortunes, beginning humbly in a wide and treeless plain, where jimson, dock, and mustard weed have their will with the grass, passing a number of houses, each in its own tiny yard, creeping up the hill and the social scale at the same time, until it is bordered by velvety boulevards and terraces and lawns that glow in the evening light, and pretty houses often painted; then dropping again to a lonely gully, with the flaming kilns of the brick-yard on one side, and the huge dark bulk of the brewery on the other, reaching at last the bustle and roar of the busiest street in town. The great arc-light swung a dazzling white porcupine above the brewery vats every night (when the moon did not shine), and hung level with the crest of the opposite bluff. By day or night one could see the trim old-fashioned garden and the close-cropped lawn and the tall bur-oaks that shaded the two-story brown cottage in which for fifteen years Margaret Clark had lived. Here she was living at the time of these events, with no protector except her bull-dog, the Colonel (who, to be sure, understood his business, and I cannot deny him a personal pronoun), and no companion except Esquire Clark, her cat. She did not keep fowls—judging it right and necessary to slay them on occasion, but never having the heart to kill anything for which she had cared and which she had taught to know her. Therefore she bought her eggs and her “frying chickens” of George Washington, a worthy colored man who lived below the hill, and who kept Margaret’s garden in order. Although he had worked for her (satisfactory service given for satisfactory wage) during all these fifteen years, he knew as little about her, he declared, as the first week he came. Nor did the wizened little Irishwoman who climbed the clay stairway three times a week to wash and scrub know any more. But she stoutly maintained “the old lady was a rale lady, and the saints would be good to her.” One reporter, more curious, discovered that Margaret several times had helped this woman over a rough pass.