The house lay beneath him as
still as a well. It was nothing more than a three-tiered cavern
of quietness.
So he crept back to his own room and closed and locked the door
after him. It was a top-floor rear, where a hip-roof gave his
back wall the rake of a Baltimore buckeye, and a dismantled
electric call-bell bore ignominious testimony to the fact that
his skyey abode had once been a servant's quarters.
But the room was quiet, and, what counted more, it was cheap. The
thought of ever being put out of it terrified the frugal-minded
Trotter. For seven weary months he had wandered about New York's
skyline, looking for just the right corner, as peevish as a
cow-bird looking for a copse nest.
Yet Mrs. Teetzel's laws were adamantine. Her rule was as
Procrustean as her thin-lashed eyes were inquisitive. She daily
inspected both her lavishly distributed lambrequins and her
"gentleman roomers'" mail, with an occasional discreet excursion
into their unlocked trunks. Cooking in a bedroom was as illicit
as private laundry work in the second-floor bathtub. A young
Toronto poet who had learned the trick of buttering an envelope
and in it neatly shirring an egg over a gas jet was first
reminded that he was four weeks behind in his rent and then sadly
yet firmly ejected from the top-floor skylight room.
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