A nearly-deserted bar with two customers now planted itself in Jo's dreams, the two customers being old companions of Jo's. They were talking over They were talking over old times and reminiscing over past Christmasses. One of tho women was showing the other a newspaper clipping, "Too bad. Wonder if old Jo left any sort of will. She ought to have a mint horded up somewhere, the way she always drank nothing but draft beer. Always afraid she'd spond a dime on someone else, the old tightwad !" Jo got a better view of the clipping and noticed a photograph above the notice. As sho squinted more closely at the photograph in the dim light of the bar, she saw her own fase in the picture.

Jo awakened with a start, while the movie was in the midst of a scene where Ebenezer Sorooge visits tho mortuary and realizes with horror that the body lying in the coffin is his, then seconds later witnesses his own mournerless burial service.

A feeling of terror gripped Jo as sho hastily left tho theater, and she felt almost as though an unseen force were propelling her toward one of her old haunts, the Bayside Inn, a plac0 which Jo had not froquented for the past two years.

III

Recent years had found New Boston caught up in a wave of revamping its waterfront district. Thanks to the city's Urban Renewal project, which was still far from being completed, the grimy, derelict character of the West Sido waterfront was rapidly changing into a vast, beautifullylandscaped shopping mall, complete with several luxury hotels and the Llewellyn Center, which was second in size only to its twin across the river, the Lloyd Conter, reputedly the world's largest shopping center.

The Urban Renewal project, together with the oxtension of the Willametto Freeway further into town, had effected many changes, and many a visitor returning to Now Boston after a long absence missed more than a few of the familiar, almost traditional, landmarks of the city. The old Herald Building on Ninth and Pino now sat on First and Locust, except for a fresh paint job highlighting its ginger-