clothes she had taken off the night before, or even before that, lay in
a ring about the place where her feet had been when she dropped them in
the dust and lint which rolled about in the corners like feathers. Her
corset was thrown down in a corner; shoes and stockings littered the
floor; her comb was clogged with red hair like a wire fence with dead
grass after a freshet; dingy, grimy underclothing lay about. I peered
into a closet, in which there were more garments on the floor than on
the nails. The other bedroom was quite as unkempt; looking as if the
occupant must always do his chamber work at the last moment before going
to bed. They were as unclean outwardly as inwardly.

After ransacking the house up-chamber, I ran down-stairs and went into
the room from which Rucker had come, where I found the girl hiding
behind a sofa, peeking over the back of it at me, and screaming "Go
away!" All the walls in this room were hung with some thin black cloth,
and it looked like the inside of a hearse. There was a stand in one
corner, and a large extension table in the middle of the room, with
chairs placed about it. In the corner across from the stand was a
spiritualist medium's cabinet; and hanging on the walls were a guitar, a
banjo and a fiddle. A bell stood in the middle of the table, and there
were writing materials, slates, and other things scattered about, which
theatrical people call "properties," I am told. I tore the black
draperies down, and searched for a place where my mother might be--in
bed I expected to find her, if at all; but she was not there. I tried
the cellar, but it was nothing but a vegetable cave, dug in the earth,
with no walls, and dark as a dungeon when the girl shut down the
trap-door and stood on it: from which I threw her by putting my back
under it and giving a surge. When I came up she was staggering to her
feet, and groaning as she felt of her head for the results of some
suspected cut or bump from her fall. Rucker was following me about