Explore "The Heart Line" by Gelett Burgess on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
In the year 1877 the Siskiyou House, originally a third-class hotel / patronized chiefly by mining men, had fallen into such disrepute that it / was scarcely more than a cheap tenement. Its office was now frankly a / bar-room; beside it, a narrow hallway plunged into the shabby, shadowy / interior; here a steep stairway rose. Above were disconsolate rooms / known to the police of San Francisco as the occasional resort of / counterfeiters, confidence workers and lesser knaves; to the / neighborhood the Siskiyou Hotel had a local reputation as being the home / of Madam Grant, who occupied two rooms on the second floor.
Her rooms were slovenly and squalid -- almost barbarous in the extremity / of their neglect. Upon the floor was a matted carpet of dirt and / rubbish inches deep, piled higher at the corners, uneven with lumps of / refuse, bizarre with scraps of paper, cloth and tangled strings.