choose it for their home. But Love and Beauty have a great confidence in
themselves--a confidence curiously supported by history,--and they never
had a moment's doubt that this place was as good as another for an
earthly Paradise. So Love signed an agreement for one great room at the
very top, the very masthead of the building, and Beauty made it pretty
with muslin curtains, flowers, and dainty makeshifts of furniture, but
chiefly with the light of her own heavenly face. A stroke of luck coming
one day to the poet, the lovers, with that extravagance which the poor
alone have the courage to enjoy, procured a piano on the kind-hearted
hire-purchase system, a system specially conceived for lovers. Then,
indeed, for many a wonderful night that room was not only on the seventh
floor, but in the seventh heaven; and as Beauty would sit at the piano,
with her long hair flying loose, and her soul like a whirl of starlight
about her brows, a stranger peering in across the soft lamplight, seeing
her face, hearing her voice, would deem that the long climb, flight
after flight of dreary stair, had been appropriately rewarded by a
glimpse of heaven.

Certainly it must have seemed a strange contrast from the life about and
below it. The foot of that infernal stair plunged in the warm
rum-and-thick-twist atmosphere of a sailor's tavern--and 'The Jolly
Shipmates' was a house of entertainment by no means to be despised.
Often have I sat there with the poet, drinking the whisky from which
Scotland takes its name, among wondering sea-boots and sou'-westers, who
could make nothing of that wild hair and that still wilder talk.

From the kingdom of rum and tar you mounted into a zone of commission
agents fund shipbrokers, a chill, unoccupied region, in which every
small office bore the names of half a dozen different firms, and yet
somehow could not contrive to look busy. Finally came an airy echoing