ed if "the
Lindley boys" still lived there, and if Richard Lindley would hate
him now as implacably as then.

A hundred yards farther on, he paused before a house more familiar
to him than any other, and gave it a moment's whimsical attention,
without emotion.

It was a shabby old brick structure, and it stood among the
gayest, the most flamboyant dwellings of all Corliss Street like a
bewildered tramp surrounded by carnival maskers. It held place
full in the course of the fury for demolition and rebuilding, but
remained unaltered--even unrepaired, one might have thought--since
the early seventies, when it was built. There was a sagging
cornice, and the nauseous brown which the walls had years ago been
painted was sooted to a repellent dinge, so cracked and peeled
that the haggard red bricks were exposed, like a beggar through
the holes in his coat. It was one of those houses which are large
without being commodious; its very tall, very narrow windows, with
their attenuated, rusty inside shutters, boasting to the passerby
of high ceilings but betraying the miserly floor spaces. At each
side of the front door was a high and cramped bay-window, one of
them insanely culminating in a little six-sided tower of slate,
and both of them girdled above the basement windows by a narrow
porch, which ran across the front of the house and gave access to
the shallow vestibule. However, a pleasant circumstance modified
the gloom of this edifice and assured it a remnant of reserve and
dignity in its ill-considered old age: it stood back a fine
hundred feet from the highway, and was shielded in part by a
friendly group of maple trees and one glorious elm, hoary, robust,
and majestic, a veteran of the days when this was forest ground.

Mr. Corliss concluded his momentary pause by walking up the broken
cement path, which was hard beset by plantain-weed and the long
grass of the ill-kept lawn. Ascending the steps, he was assailed
by an odour as of vehement bananas, a diffusion from some painful
little chairs standing in the long, high, dim, rather sorrowful
hall disclosed beyond the open double doors. They were stiff
little chairs of an inconsequent, mongrel pattern; armless, with
perforated wooden seats; legs tortured by the lathe to a semblance
of buttons strung on a rod; and they had that day received a
streaky coat of a gilding preparation which exhaled the olfactory
vehemence mentioned. Their present station was temporary, their