ing the enormous oaken
beams, their ends carved into fantastic figures, which crown with a
black bas-relief the lower floor of most of them. In one place these
transverse timbers are covered with slate and mark a bluish line along
the frail wall of a dwelling covered by a roof _en colombage_ which
bends beneath the weight of years, and whose rotting shingles are
twisted by the alternate action of sun and rain. In another place
blackened, worn-out window-sills, with delicate sculptures now scarcely
discernible, seem too weak to bear the brown clay pots from which
springs the heart's-ease or the rose-bush of some poor working-woman.
Farther on are doors studded with enormous nails, where the genius of
our forefathers has traced domestic hieroglyphics, of which the meaning
is now lost forever. Here a Protestant attested his belief; there
a Leaguer cursed Henry IV.; elsewhere some bourgeois has carved the
insignia of his _noblesse de cloches_, symbols of his long-forgotten
magisterial glory. The whole history of France is there.

Next to a tottering house with roughly plastered walls, where an artisan
enshrines his tools, rises the mansion of a country gentleman, on the
stone arch of which above the door vestiges of armorial bearings may
still be seen, battered by the many revolutions that have shaken France
since 1789. In this hilly street the ground-floors of the merchants are
neither shops nor warehouses; lovers of the Middle Ages will here find
the _ouvrouere_ of our forefathers in all its naive simplicity. These
low rooms, which have no shop-frontage, no show-windows, in fact
no glass at all, are deep and dark and without interior or exterior
decoration. Their doors open in two parts, each roughly iron-bound; the
upper half is fastened back within the room, the lower half, fitted with
a spring-bell, swings continually to and fro. Air and light reach the
damp den within, either through the upper half of the door, or through
an open space between the ceiling and a low front wall, breast-high,
which is closed by solid shutters that are taken down every morning, put
up every evening, and held in place by heavy iron bars.

This wall serves as a counter for the merchandise. No delusive display
is there; only samples of the business, whatever it may chance to
be,--such, for instance, as three or four tubs full of codfish and
salt, a few bundles of sail-cloth, cordage, copper wire hanging from
the joists above, iron hoops for