stand.

"The Morgue--quick!" he ordered, not even noticing the
flabbergasted look on the jehu's face, who was not accustomed to
carrying people thither from the primrose path of Broadway quite
so rapidly.




XXI

THE MORGUE


There had come a lull in the activities which never entirely
cease, night or day, in the dingy building at the foot of East
Twenty-sixth Street. Across the street in the municipal lodging-
house the city's homeless were housed for the night. Even ever
wakeful Bellevue Hospital nearby was comparatively quiet.

The last "dead boat" which carries the city's unclaimed corpses
away for burial had long ago left, when we arrived. The anxious
callers who pass all day through the portals of the mortuary
chamber seeking lost friends and relatives had disappeared. Except
for the night keeper and one or two assistants, the Morgue was
empty save of the overcrowded dead.

Years before, as a cub reporter on the Star, I had had the
gruesome assignment once of the Morgue. It was the same old place