could come up to them. In fact Second avenue was so solitary a place that when Nellie got to Thirty-fourth street she thought she would try that just for luck.
She would probably have continued right on to the ferry because nobody thereabouts appeared to have any objection, had it not been for the fact that a fire engine and hose cart galloped through First avenue to answer an alarm turned in from the box at First avenue and Thirty-second street. Nellie was not interested in fire engines. So she took to the sidewalk in front of 334, and at 336 she seemed to say to herself: "This is the place I've been looking for."
At all events she entered the doorway at that number. On the ground floor is Henry Gruner's barber shop. Henry was shaving a customer when Nellie passed his window and turned into the hall next door. The customer left the chair so promptly that he nearly got his throat cut and disappeared down the street with the towel still about his neck, in the direction of the East River. Nellie walked right through the narrow hall, taking with her a segment of the balustrade. The door that leads into the back yard was not built to accommodate elephants, as Mr. Diehl explained some time later, but Nellie managed to wiggle through it, though she knocked down about half the coping in the process.
High board fences separate 336 from 338, and 338 from 340. That is to say, they did. They don't now, because Nellie walked through them as if they had been paper. But before this she took a look in at the kitchen window on the ground floor of 336, where Mrs. Gruner, the barber's wife, and their children, Tessie, Henry and Louisa, were eating breakfast. The happy family looked up from their oatmeal and beheld an uncommon face at the window, the face of an elephant seeking companionship.
Mrs. Gruner and all the little Gruners experienced spots before the eyes and a sudden loss of appetite. In fact, they beat it for the street. It was then that Nellie, again abandoned, moved into 338. There was nobody there either, except up above on the fire escape. So she moved through the fence into 340. Every one had gone away from there too. It was then that the elephant broke down and wept. At least, she lifted up her trunk and trumpeted to the high heavens.
Meantime Prof. Rossi and his staff of assistants had been trailing the wandering Nellie. She was never out of their sight, but they never could quite catch up with her because
