he black lamps and their frames, and the
scaffoldings. Nor did his wife complain. At all events, she no longer
had that chronic grumbler prowling around her chair for whole days,
with schemes for gigantic enterprises, combinations that missed fire in
advance, lamentations concerning the past, and a fixed determination not
to work at anything to earn money.

She no longer earned anything herself, poor woman; but she knew so well
how to save, her wonderful economy made up so completely for everything
else, that absolute want, although a near neighbor of such impecuniosity
as theirs, never succeeded in making its way into those three rooms,
which were always neat and clean, or in destroying the carefully mended
garments or the old furniture so well concealed beneath its coverings.

Opposite the Chebes' door, whose copper knob gleamed in bourgeois
fashion upon the landing, were two other and smaller ones.

On the first, a visiting-card, held in place by four nails, according to
the custom in vogue among industrial artists, bore the name of

RISLER
DESIGNER OF PATTERNS.

On the other was a small square of leather, with these words in gilt
letters:

MESDAMES DELOBELLE
BIRDS AND INSECTS FOR ORNAMENT.

The Delobelles' door was often open, disclosing a large room with a
brick floor, where two women, mother and daughter, the latter almost
a child, each as weary and as pale as the other, worked at one of the
thousand fanciful little trades which go to make up what is called the
'Articles de Paris'.

It was then the fashion to ornament hats and ballgowns with the lovely
little insects from South America that have the brilliant coloring of
jewels and reflect the light like diamonds. The Delobelles had adopted
that specialty.

A wholesale house, to which consignments were made directly from the
Antilles, sent to them, unopened, long, light boxes from which, when
the lid was removed, arose a faint odor, a dust of arsenic through which
gleamed the piles of insects, impaled before being shipped, the birds
packed closely together, their wings held in place by a strip of thin
paper. They must all be mounted--the insects quivering upon brass wire,
the humming-birds with their feathers ruffled; they must be cleansed and
polished, the beak in a bright red, claw repaired with a silk thread,
dead eyes replaced with sparkling pearls, and the insect or the bird
restored to an appe