old acquaintance sake and that of local colour;
besides which, a figure is nothing without a setting, and our young man
came and went every day, with rather an indifferent, unperceiving step,
it is true, among the objects I have briefly designated. One of his
rooms was directly above the street-door of the house; such a dormitory,
when it is so exiguous, is called in the nomenclature of New York a
"hall bedroom." The sitting-room, beside it, was slightly larger, and
they both commanded a row of tenements no less degenerate than Ransom's
own habitation--houses built forty years before, and already sere and
superannuated. These were also painted red, and the bricks were
accentuated by a white line; they were garnished, on the first floor,
with balconies covered with small tin roofs, striped in different
colours, and with an elaborate iron lattice-work, which gave them a
repressive, cage-like appearance, and caused them slightly to resemble
the little boxes for peeping unseen into the street, which are a feature
of oriental towns. Such posts of observation commanded a view of the
grocery on the corner, of the relaxed and disjointed roadway, enlivened
at the curbstone with an occasional ash-barrel or with gas-lamps
drooping from the perpendicular, and westward, at the end of the
truncated vista, of the fantastic skeleton of the Elevated Railway,
overhanging the transverse longitudinal street, which it darkened and
smothered with the immeasurable spinal column and myriad clutching paws
of an antediluvian monster. If the opportunity were not denied me here,
I should like to give some account of Basil Ransom's interior, of
certain curious persons of both sexes, for the most part not favourites
of fortune, who had found an obscure asylum there; some picture of the
crumpled little _table d'hote_, at two dollars and a half a week, where
everything felt sticky, which went forward in the low-ceiled basement,
under the conduct of a couple of shuffling negresses, who mingled in the
conversation and indulged in low, mysterious chuckles when it took a
facetious turn. But we need, in strictness, concern ourselves with it no
further than to gather the implication that the young Mississippian,
even a year and a half after that momentous visit of his to Boston, had
not made his profession very lucrative.

He had been diligent, he had been ambitious, but he had not yet been
successful. During the few weeks preceding the moment at which we m