"A Case of Eavesdropping" by Algernon Blackwood

rusticated: suspension or expulsion from school (this word being most commonly associated with Oxford, Cambridge, and Durham).

half a million (in pounds - recall Blackwood is British) in 1916, the year of publication, depending on how you care to do your inflation adjustment, would be worth in the range of £36 million to £334 million! Even at the low end, that's a lot of quid!

An American City - unnamed, but clearly, as we find out at the end of the story with the Wall Street reference, New York City.

diggings: British slang for living quarters. Americans are more likely to be familiar with the shortened form of "digs".

"western drawl" - eh? There's a southern drawl. Mid-westerners are considered by most Americans to have no accent, or a neutral accent. Westerners, I'm not even sure what that is supposed to be. Surely not the Great Plains states. West coast states aren't noted for a drawl, although a few notable west coast accents do exist. Not sure what a western drawl is supposed to be. Weird. Indeed, as the west was settled by a variety of peoples from the eastern US, from the south (i.e. Mexico), and the west (i.e. Asia), there really wasn't time enough, certainly not by 1916, for a distinct regional accent to have developed, it's just a random collection of different people with different accents. Hmmm... But some sort of accent was written into at least some of the landlady's dialogue, so I tried to play off it as best I could.

I certainly wasn't going to try German accents for Otto and his father. There was no such accent written into the text, and while I probably could have pulled it off, I felt it would have been too distracting. And if I didn't pull it off well after all, it would be down right insulting. I was tempted to translate the relevant dialogue into German, but then most listeners would be lost so I left it in English after all.

The picture used is the interior rooms of an Old Law apartment, n.d. NYC Municipal Archives Collection.

To follow along: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14471/14471-h/14471-h.htm#chapter3