large four-story brick building,
that has so stood for about three-quarters of a century. Its rooms are
rented to a class of persons occupying them simply for lack of activity
to find better and cheaper quarters elsewhere. With its gray stucco
peeling off in broad patches, it has a solemn look of gentility in rags,
and stands, or, as it were, hangs, about the corner of two ancient
streets, like a faded fop who pretends to be looking for employment.

Under its main archway is a dingy apothecary-shop. On one street is the
bazaar of a _modiste en robes et chapeaux_ and other humble shops; on
the other, the immense batten doors with gratings over the lintels,
barred and bolted with masses of cobwebbed iron, like the door of a
donjon, are overhung by a creaking sign (left by the sheriff), on which
is faintly discernible the mention of wines and liquors. A peep through
one of the shops reveals a square court within, hung with many lines of
wet clothes, its sides hugged by rotten staircases that seem vainly
trying to clamber out of the rubbish.

The neighborhood is one long since given up to fifth-rate shops, whose
masters and mistresses display such enticing mottoes as "_Au gagne
petit!_" Innumerable children swarm about, and, by some charm of the
place, are not run over, but obstruct the sidewalks playing their
clamorous games.

The building is a thing of many windows, where passably good-looking
women appear and disappear, clad in cotton gowns, watering little
outside shelves of flowers and cacti, or hanging canaries' cages. Their
husbands are keepers in wine-warehouses, rent-collectors for the agents
of old Frenchmen who have been laid up to dry in Paris, custom-house
supernumeraries and court-clerks' deputies (for your second-rate Creole
is a great seeker for little offices). A decaying cornice hangs over,
dropping bits of mortar on passers below, like a boy at a
boarding-house.

The landlord is one Kookoo, an ancient Creole of doubtful purity of
blood, who in his landlordly old age takes all suggestions of repairs as
personal insults. He was but a stripling when his father left him this
inheritance, and has grown old and wrinkled and brown, a sort of
periodically animate mummy, in the business. He smokes cascarilla, wears
velveteen, and is as punctual as an executioner.

To Kookoo's venerable property a certain old man used for many years to
come every evening, stumbling through the groups of prattling children
wh