ed the eye with their scarlet bloom, had
fallen into utter disuse. The proprietors of the mansion had many years
before thought it best to confine themselves to the possession of the
house itself, with its thickly planted court-yard, opening into the
Faubourg Saint-Honore, and to the garden shut in by this gate, which
formerly communicated with a fine kitchen-garden of about an acre. For
the demon of speculation drew a line, or in other words projected a
street, at the farther side of the kitchen-garden. The street was
laid out, a name was chosen and posted up on an iron plate, but before
construction was begun, it occurred to the possessor of the property
that a handsome sum might be obtained for the ground then devoted
to fruits and vegetables, by building along the line of the proposed
street, and so making it a branch of communication with the Faubourg
Saint-Honore itself, one of the most important thoroughfares in the city
of Paris.

In matters of speculation, however, though "man proposes," "money
disposes." From some such difficulty the newly named street died almost
in birth, and the purchaser of the kitchen-garden, having paid a high
price for it, and being quite unable to find any one willing to take his
bargain off his hands without a considerable loss, yet still clinging
to the belief that at some future day he should obtain a sum for it that
would repay him, not only for his past outlay, but also the interest
upon the capital locked up in his new acquisition, contented himself
with letting the ground temporarily to some market-gardeners, at a
yearly rental of 500 francs. And so, as we have said, the iron gate
leading into the kitchen-garden had been closed up and left to the rust,
which bade fair before long to eat off its hinges, while to prevent the
ignoble glances of the diggers and delvers of the ground from presuming
to sully the aristocratic enclosure belonging to the mansion, the gate
had been boarded up to a height of six feet. True, the planks were not
so closely adjusted but that a hasty peep might be obtained through
their interstices; but the strict decorum and rigid propriety of the
inhabitants of the house left no grounds for apprehending that advantage
would be taken of that circumstance.

Horticulture seemed, however, to have been abandoned in the deserted
kitchen-garden; and where cabbages, carrots, radishes, pease, and melons
had once flourished, a scanty crop of lucerne alone bore eviden