the filthy shed
into that profounder sleep. In the year 1819, the body of a boy, of
fourteen years old, was taken up out of this well.

To be safe in this house, it was necessary to be of the "right sort."
The uninitiated were regarded with suspicion.

Did these miserable wretches, then, know each other? No; yet they
scented out the genuine guest of the Jacressade.

The mistress of the house was a young and rather pretty woman, wearing a
cap trimmed with ribbons. She washed herself now and then with water
from the well. She had a wooden leg.

At break of day, the courtyard became empty. Its inmates dispersed.

An old cock and some other fowls were kept in the courtyard, where they
raked among the filth of the place all day long. A long horizontal beam,
supported by posts, traversed the yard--a gibbet-shaped erection, not
out of keeping with the associations of the place. Sometimes on the
morrow of a rainy-day, a silk dress, mudded and wet, would be seen
hanging out to dry upon this beam. It belonged to the woman with the
wooden leg.

Over the shed, and like it, surrounding the yard, was a story, and above
this story a loft. A rotten wooden ladder, passing through a hole in
the roof of the shed, conducted to this story; and up this ladder the
woman would climb, sometimes staggering while its crazy rounds creaked
beneath her.

The occasional lodgers, whether by the week or the night, slept in the
courtyard; the regular inmates lived in the house.

Windows without a pane of glass, door-frames with no door, fireplaces
without stoves; such were the chief features of the interior. You might
pass from one room to the other, indifferently, by a long square
aperture which had been the door, or by a triangular hole between the
joists of the partitions. The fallen plaster of the ceiling lay about
the floor. It was difficult to say how the old house still stood erect.
The high winds indeed shook it. The lodgers ascended as they could by
the worn and slippery steps of the ladder. Everything was open to the
air. The wintry atmosphere was absorbed into the house, like water into
a sponge. The multitude of spiders seemed alone to guarantee the place
against falling to pieces immediately. There was no sign of furniture.
Two or three paillasses were in the corner, their ticking torn in parts,
and showing more dust than straw within. Here and there were a water-pot
and an earthen pipkin. A close, disagreeable odour haunted the ro