He went about the city from dawn to dark, his feet dragging, his head hanging low and swinging from side to side with the motion of his gait.

He rarely spoke; his eyes took on a dull, glazed appearance, filmy, like the eyes of a dead fish.

At certain intervals his mania came upon him, the strange hallucination of something four-footed, the persistent fancy that the brute in him had now grown so large, so insatiable, that it had taken everything, even to his very self, his own identity--that he had literally _become the brute_.

The attack passed off and left him wondering, perplexed.
The Reno House, where Vandover had lived for some fifteen months, was a sort of hotel on Sacramento Street below Kearney.

The neighbourhood was low--just on the edge of the Barbary Coast, abounding in stores for second-hand clothing, saloons, pawnshops, gun-stores, bird-stores, and the shops of Chinese cobblers.