t not
the highwayman. It would not, however, be safe to trust this
distinction. This last stage of vagabondage may have its extremes of
scoundrelism. It was on an occasion, when casting their nets into the
Epi-scie--which was in Paris what the Jacressade was in St. Malo--that
the police captured the notorious Lacenaire.

These lurking-places refuse nobody. To fall in the social scale has a
tendency to bring men to one level. Sometimes honesty in tatters found
itself there. Virtue and probity have been known before now to be
brought to strange passes. We must not judge always by appearances, even
in the palace or at the galleys. Public respect, as well as universal
reprobation, requires testing. Surprising results sometimes spring from
this principle. An angel may be discovered in the stews; a pearl in the
dunghill. Such sad and dazzling discoveries are not altogether unknown.

The Jacressade was rather a courtyard than a house; and more of a well
than a courtyard. It had no stories looking on the street. Its facade
was simply a high wall, with a low gateway. You raised the latch, pushed
the gate, and were at once in the courtyard.

In the midst of this yard might be perceived a round hole, encircled
with a margin of stones, and even with the ground. The yard was small,
the well large. A broken pavement surrounded it.

The courtyard was square, and built on three sides only. On the side of
the street was only the wall; facing you as you entered the gateway
stood the house, the two wings of which formed the sides to right and
left.

Any one entering there after nightfall, at his own risk and peril, would
have heard a confused murmur of voices; and, if there had been moonlight
or starlight enough to give shape to the obscure forms before his eyes,
this is what he would have seen.

The courtyard: the well. Around the courtyard, in front of the gate, a
lean-to or shed, in a sort of horse-shoe form, but with square corners;
a rotten gallery, with a roof of joists supported by stone pillars at
unequal distances. In the centre, the well; around the well, upon a
litter of straw, a kind of circular chaplet, formed of the soles of
boots and shoes; some trodden down at heel, some showing the toes of the
wearers, some the naked heels. The feet of men, women, and children, all
asleep.

Beyond these feet, the eye might have distinguished, in the shadow of
the shed, bodies, drooping heads, forms stretched out lazily, bundles of