the gable were dentelled squarely into something like
steps, as low down as the string-course of the upper floor, where the
rain from the roof fell to right and left of the house through the jaws
of a fantastic gargoyle. A freestone foundation projected like a step at
the base of the house; and on either side of the entrance, between the
two windows, was a trap-door, clamped by heavy iron bands, through which
the cellars were entered,--a last vestige of ancient usages.

From the time the house was built, this facade had been carefully
cleaned twice a year. If a little mortar fell from between the bricks,
the crack was instantly filled up. The sashes, the sills, the copings,
were dusted oftener than the most precious sculptures in the Louvre. The
front of the house bore no signs of decay; notwithstanding the deepened
color which age had given to the bricks, it was as well preserved as
a choice old picture, or some rare book cherished by an amateur, which
would be ever new were it not for the blistering of our climate and the
effect of gases, whose pernicious breath threatens our own health.

The cloudy skies and humid atmosphere of Flanders, and the shadows
produced by the narrowness of the street, sometimes diminished the
brilliancy which the old house derived from its cleanliness; moreover,
the very care bestowed upon it made it rather sad and chilling to the
eye. A poet might have wished some leafage about the shrine, a little
moss in the crevices of the freestone, a break in the even courses of
the brick; he would have longed for a swallow to build her nest in
the red coping that roofed the arches of the windows. The precise and
immaculate air of this facade, a little worn by perpetual rubbing, gave
the house a tone of severe propriety and estimable decency which would
have driven a romanticist out of the neighborhood, had he happened to
take lodgings over the way.

When a visitor had pulled the braided iron wire bell-cord which hung
from the top of the pilaster of the doorway, and the servant-woman,
coming from within, had admitted him through the side of the double-door
in which was a small grated loop-hole, that half of the door escaped
from her hand and swung back by its own weight with a solemn, ponderous
sound that echoed along the roof of a wide paved archway and through the
depths of the house, as though the door had been of iron. This archway,
painted to resemble marble, always clean and daily sprinkled wi