Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 5, 2025
She had noticed it first when she looked in the room before saying hello. Mr. Crawford was sitting facing the portieres that covered the folding doors that partitioned the room. The portieres were a very clever ruse of Mrs. Balmer. Behind them were screwed hooks and these hooks functioned as a clothes-closet. Mrs. Balmer noticed that Mr.
Balmer, when she had time for such things as contemplation, grew curious about the man in the back room. In fact she transferred her curiosity from the Japanese female impersonator on the second floor and the beautiful and remarkably gowned middle-aged woman on the first floor to this man who kept four kerosene lamps and an electric bulb burning all night on the third floor. For some time Mrs.
He identified himself as Joseph Crawford, offered to pay $5 a week for a 12 by 12 room on the third floor at the rear end of the long gloomy hallway and arrived the next day at Mrs. Balmer's faded tenement with an equally faded trunk. Nothing happened. But when Mrs. Balmer entered the room the following morning to straighten it up she found several innovations.
Balmer was a clear-headed, fair-minded theologian in fact, so very fair, and even generous, was he wont to be in dealing with opponents that he sometimes, quite unjustly, incurred the suspicion of being in sympathy, if not in league, with these opponents.
But always after that Mrs. Balmer noticed that the door remained open. Open doors are frequent in rooming-houses. People grow lonely and leave the doors of their cubby holes open. There is nothing odd about that. Yet one evening while Mrs. Balmer stood gossiping with this man in the doorway she noticed something about him that disturbed her.
Balmer gave some time since, in the case of the hydrogen spectrum, an empirical formula which enabled the rays discovered later by an eminent astronomer, M. Deslandres, to be represented; but since then, both in the cases of line and band spectra, the labours of Professor Rydberg, of M. Deslandres, of Professors Kayzer and Runge, and of M. Thiele, have enabled us to comprehend, in their smallest details, the laws of the distribution of lines and bands.
A gay, festive illumination streamed out of the opened doorway and Mrs. Balmer paid a social call. She found her roomer sitting in a chair, reading. Around him blazed four large kerosene lamps. But there was nothing else to notice. His eyes were probably bad, and Mrs. Balmer, after exchanging a few words on the subject of towels, transportation and the weather, said good-night.
Most of the clerks at the Planet had been laid under contribution by him in their time, for Harold had a way with him that was good for threepence any pay-day, and it seemed to him that things had come to a sorry pass if he could not extract something special from Plutocrat Balmer in his hour of rejoicing.
Balmer was worried over the thought that this man was probably an experimenter. He probably fussed around with things as an old crank does sometimes, and he would end by burning down the house or blowing it up accidentally. But Mrs. Balmer's fears were removed one evening when she happened to look down the gloomy hallway and notice that this man's door was open.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking