Coming away with his point half gained, he once more passed Colonel Pallinder's office door. At that time the Turner Building was at the very core of our business district. There was a bank on the ground floor, the old Third National--J. B. had some position in it, assistant bookkeeper, perhaps. One used to catch fleeting glimpses of the young fellow's big shoulders in shirt-sleeves, and sleek, dark head on an altitudinous stool behind gilt wire screens, through the plate-glass windows on the Market Street side. On his last visit he told me that he had gone down Market Street and walked past those old windows in a sentimental mood, recalling the brave days when he was twenty-one. "I got sixty a month," he said, "and thought I was doing first-rate! It's hard to believe that that old rookery was the best office building in town. We hadn't the beginnings of an idea about fire-proof construction; but there was an elevator, and the bank had a floor of black and red tiles, remember? The passages were so dim the gas had to be kept burning at noon-day. The steam-heating apparatus must have been one of the first put in; anyway it never did very well, and was forever breaking down. I've worked in my overcoat many a time, with a blue nose, figuring away with my stiff fingers. Harvey Smith--you know, Jim's brother--had a law-office with some other young chap, I've forgot who, now, on the third floor, and they set up a sheet-iron cannon-stove to keep from freezing to death. There wasn't much business coming Harvey's way in those days--we used to wonder how he made out." That part of town is now given over to warehouses and junk-shops. The dirty, draughty hallways of the Turner Building are very empty and melancholy. They used to be handsomely carpeted with cocoa-matting, and in the odd corners one came upon little pyramids of tin spittoons piled up handily by the janitor, either just washed or in need of washing. The place was as busy as an anthill that morning when Doctor Vardaman paced along the cocoa-paths on his way out. Near the top of the stairs--which were generally preferred to the elevator--he encountered Colonel Pallinder ushering from his office somebody with a shawl and bonnet and fat black umbrella, whose outlines in the semi-obscurity appeared vaguely familiar to the old gentleman's casual glance.