ch is so
changeable and so rainy, gave this part of the city a peculiar character
of its own; but they have now disappeared. Not a single house in the
river bank remains, and not more than about a hundred feet of the old
"piliers des Halles," the last that have resisted the action of time,
are left; and before long even that relic of the sombre labyrinth of old
Paris will be demolished. Certainly, the existence of such old ruins
of the middle-ages is incompatible with the grandeurs of modern Paris.
These observations are meant not so much to regret the destruction of
the old town, as to preserve in words, and by the history of those who
lived there, the memory of a place now turned to dust, and to excuse
the following description, which may be precious to a future age now
treading on the heels of our own.

The walls of this house were of wood covered with slate. The spaces
between the uprights had been filled in, as we may still see in some
provincial towns, with brick, so placed, by reversing their thickness,
as to make a pattern called "Hungarian point." The window-casings and
lintels, also in wood, were richly carved, and so was the corner pillar
where it rose above the shrine of the Madonna, and all the other pillars
in front of the house. Each window, and each main beam which separated
the different storeys, was covered with arabesques of fantastic
personages and animals wreathed with conventional foliage. On the street
side, as on the river side, the house was capped with a roof looking as
if two cards were set up one against the other,--thus presenting a gable
to the street and a gable to the water. This roof, like the roof of
a Swiss chalet, overhung the building so far that on the second floor
there was an outside gallery with a balustrade, on which the owners of
the house could walk under cover and survey the street, also the river
basin between the bridges and the two lines of houses.

These houses on the river bank were very valuable. In those days a
system of drains and fountains was still to be invented; nothing of the
kind as yet existed except the circuit sewer, constructed by Aubriot,
provost of Paris under Charles the Wise, who also built the Bastille,
the pont Saint-Michel and other bridges, and was the first man of
genius who ever thought of the sanitary improvement of Paris. The houses
situated like that of Lecamus took from the river the water necessary
for the purposes of life, and also made the