d possessor of a fashionable kepi. Besides, we had a glass of
Hermitage last night; the glow still suffuses my memory. I was growing
positively niggardly with that Hermitage, positively niggardly. Let me
take the hint: we had one bottle to celebrate the appearance of our
visionary fortune; let us have a second to console us for its
occultation. The third I hereby dedicate to Jean-Marie's wedding
breakfast.'

CHAPTER VII. THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF DESPREZ.

The Doctor's house has not yet received the compliment of a description,
and it is now high time that the omission were supplied, for the house is
itself an actor in the story, and one whose part is nearly at an end. Two
stories in height, walls of a warm yellow, tiles of an ancient ruddy
brown diversified with moss and lichen, it stood with one wall to the
street in the angle of the Doctor's property. It was roomy, draughty,
and inconvenient. The large rafters were here and there engraven with
rude marks and patterns; the handrail of the stair was carved in
countrified arabesque; a stout timber pillar, which did duty to support
the dining-room roof, bore mysterious characters on its darker side,
runes, according to the Doctor; nor did he fail, when he ran over the
legendary history of the house and its possessors, to dwell upon the
Scandinavian scholar who had left them. Floors, doors, and rafters made
a great variety of angles; every room had a particular inclination; the
gable had tilted towards the garden, after the manner of a leaning tower,
and one of the former proprietors had buttressed the building from that
side with a great strut of wood, like the derrick of a crane. Altogether,
it had many marks of ruin; it was a house for the rats to desert; and
nothing but its excellent brightness--the window-glass polished and
shining, the paint well scoured, the brasses radiant, the very prop all
wreathed about with climbing flowers--nothing but its air of a
well-tended, smiling veteran, sitting, crutch and all, in the sunny
corner of a garden, marked it as a house for comfortable people to
inhabit. In poor or idle management it would soon have hurried into the
blackguard stages of decay. As it was, the whole family loved it, and
the Doctor was never better inspired than when he narrated its imaginary
story and drew the character of its successive masters, from the Hebrew
merchant who had re-edified its walls after the sack of the town, and
past the m