Show Mice in a Skyscraper Where do the mice come from1 Is a question as hard to answer as where do pins go said a New York architect archi-tect My office Is on the seventeenth or top story of a modern building In the Val street district All Its walls are solid and there are no hollows such as arc found in a wooden building The spaces under the wooden floorings floor-ings are filled with cement the washboards wash-boards are marble where steampipes run through the floors the openings are sealed with metal so that one cannot find a cranny to conceal much less passages for even a mouse Yet mice are there concealed somewhere making their way somehow from floor to floor until they have reached the uppermost Only the other day I looked up from my work and saw a small gray mouse I skated a flat paperweight across the floor at him and though It only struck the letterfile tho fright half killed him Then I learned that I had undone In a second tho work of six months as It I turned out that the I stenographer had been cultivating Mr Mouses friendship with bits of bread and candy The engineer says there arc rats in I the basement where they have tallow aid oil und soap to live on but they do not come above the first floor r He showed me once a thin procession of red ants passing in and out of t crack in the marble floor o the tenth stor hull hullThey They must have come up by minute and devious crevices to this point one hundred and twenty odd feet from the level of the street But even so their presence was strange for all the ground except Trinity churchyard two blocks away is completely and solidly covered with buildings and pavings I There Is not a single square Inch of bare soil In the vicinity 1 I |