s:
in the spring and summer, dirty-faced children and mean-looking
dogs seem to spring from it spontaneously; they are succeeded
during the colder weather by a crop of tumble-down barrels, and
cast-away broken carts; while the humbler and more insignificant
things, the uncared for weeds, so to speak, of the abundant
harvest, such as potato parings, and fish heads, and shreds of
ragged dish-cloths, and bits of broken crockery, and old bones,
are in season all the year round.

In the midst of this filth, with policy-shops adjacent, and
pawnbrokers' offices close at hand, and rum shops convenient in
the neighborhood--where the reeking streets and stagnant gutters,
and the heaps of decomposing garbage, send up a stench so thick
and heavy that it beslimes everything it touches, and makes a man
feel as if he were far past the saving powers of soap and soft
water, and was fast dissolving into rancid lard oil--in this
congenial atmosphere flourishes the prophetess, and here is found
the mansion of Mrs. Fleury, "the most celebrated lady of the age
in telling future events." Her mansion is not one that would be
selected as a permanent residence by any one with a superabundance
of cash capital, nor did it seem quite suited to the deservings
of the "most celebrated lady of the present age;" the house, a
three-story brick, originally intended to be something above the
common, has been for so many years misused and badly treated by
reckless tenants, that it has completely lost its good temper, as
well as its good looks, and is now in a perpetual state of
aggravated sulkiness. It resents the presence of a stranger as
an impertinent intrusion, and avenges the personality in various
disagreeable ways. It twitches its rickety stairways impatiently
under his feet, as if to shake him off and damage him by the
fall--it viciously attempts to pinch and jam his fingers with
moody dogged doors, which hold back as long as they can, and then
close with a sudden snap, exceedingly dangerous to the unwary--it
tears his clothes with ambushed rusty nails, and unsuspected
hooks, and sharp and jagged splinters--it creaks its floors under
his tread with a doleful whine, and complains of his cruel
treatment in sharp-pointed, many-cornered tears of plaster, which
it drops from the ceiling upon his head the instant he takes his
hat off--it yawns its wide cellar doors open like a greedy mouth,
evidently hoping that an unlucky step will pitch him headlong