ich she lived, though three stories in height, is very short
between joints, which style of architecture makes all the rooms
low and squat, as if somebody had shut the house into itself like
a telescope, and had never pulled it out again.

Out of the chimney, which was the little end of the telescope,
issued a sickly smoke; and through a door in the lower story,
which was the big end thereof, was the stranger admitted by a
little girl. This girl was, probably, a pure article of gipsy
herself originally, but had been so much adulterated by partial
civilization that she combed her hair daily and submitted to
shoes and stockings without a murmur. Ragged indeed was this
reclaimed wanderer; saucy and dirty-faced was this sprouting
young maiden, but she was sharp-witted, and scented money as
quickly as if she had been the oldest hag of her tribe; so she
asked her customer to walk up stairs, which he did. She herself
went up stairs with a skip and a whirl, showed her visitor into
the grand reception room with a gyrating flourish, and disappeared
in a "courtesy" of so many complex and dizzy rotations that she
seemed to the eyes of the bewildered traveller to evaporate in a
red flannel mist. As soon as she had spun herself out of sight he
recovered his presence of mind and looked about him.

The romantic gipsy who sojourned here had tried to furnish her
rooms like civilized people, doubtless out of respect to her many
patrons. A thread-bare carpet was under foot; a little parlor
stove with a little fire in it was standing on a little piece of
zinc, and did its little utmost to heat the room; an uncomfortable
looking sofa covered with shabby and faded red damask graced one
side of the apartment, and a lounge, of curtailed dimensions,
partially covered with shreds of turkey red calico, adorned
another side.

This latter article of furniture, with its tattered cover,
through which suspicious bits of curled hair peeped out, and wide
crevices in its rickety frame were plainly visible, looked much
too suggestive of cockroaches and other insect delicacies of the
season to be an inviting place of repose.

Three chairs were dispersed throughout the room, on one of which
the reporter bestowed himself, and the rest of the furniture
consisted of a table, so exceedingly shaky and sensitive in the
joints that it might have been the grim skeleton of some former
table, loosely hung together with unseen wires; and a cheap
looking-glass th