o frolicked about in the early moonlight--whose name no one knew, but
whom all the neighbors designated by the title of 'Sieur George. It was
his wont to be seen taking a straight--too straight--course toward his
home, never careening to right or left, but now forcing himself slowly
forward, as though there were a high gale in front, and now scudding
briskly ahead at a ridiculous little dog-trot, as if there were a
tornado behind. He would go up the main staircase very carefully,
sometimes stopping half-way up for thirty or forty minutes' doze, but
getting to the landing eventually, and tramping into his room in the
second story, with no little elation to find it still there. Were it not
for these slight symptoms of potations, he was such a one as you would
pick out of a thousand for a miser. A year or two ago he suddenly
disappeared.

A great many years ago, when the old house was still new, a young man
with no baggage save a small hair-trunk, came and took the room I have
mentioned and another adjoining. He supposed he might stay fifty
days--and he staid fifty years and over. This was a very fashionable
neighborhood, and he kept the rooms on that account month after month.

But when he had been here about a year something happened to him, so it
was rumored, that greatly changed the tenor of his life; and from that
time on there began to appear in him and to accumulate upon each other
in a manner which became the profound study of Kookoo, the symptoms of a
decay, whose cause baffled the landlord's limited powers of conjecture
for well-nigh half a century. Hints of a duel, of a reason warped, of
disinheritance, and many other unauthorized rumors, fluttered up and
floated off, while he became recluse, and, some say, began incidentally
to betray the unmanly habit which we have already noticed. His neighbors
would have continued neighborly had he allowed them, but he never let
himself be understood, and _les Americains_ are very droll anyhow; so,
as they could do nothing else, they cut him.

So exclusive he became that (though it may have been for economy) he
never admitted even a housemaid, but kept his apartments himself. Only
the merry serenaders, who in those times used to sing under the
balconies, would now and then give him a crumb of their feast for pure
fun's sake; and after a while, because they could not find out his full
name, called him, at hazard, George--but always prefixing Monsieur.
Afterward, when he beg