imate use; they had been collected
from the various demolitions which are going on every day in Paris. On
a shutter made of the boards of a shop-sign Derville read the words,
"Fancy Goods." The windows were all mismatched and grotesquely placed.
The ground floor, which seemed to be the habitable part, was on one
side raised above the soil, and on the other sunk in the rising ground.
Between the gate and the house lay a puddle full of stable litter, into
which flowed the rain-water and house waste. The back wall of this frail
construction, which seemed rather more solidly built than the rest,
supported a row of barred hutches, where rabbits bred their numerous
families. To the right of the gate was the cowhouse, with a loft above
for fodder; it communicated with the house through the dairy. To
the left was a poultry yard, with a stable and pig-styes, the roofs
finished, like that of the house, with rough deal boards nailed so as to
overlap, and shabbily thatched with rushes.

Like most of the places where the elements of the huge meal daily
devoured by Paris are every day prepared, the yard Derville now entered
showed traces of the hurry that comes of the necessity for being
ready at a fixed hour. The large pot-bellied tin cans in which milk
is carried, and the little pots for cream, were flung pell-mell at the
dairy door, with their linen-covered stoppers. The rags that were used
to clean them, fluttered in the sunshine, riddled with holes, hanging
to strings fastened to poles. The placid horse, of a breed known only
to milk-women, had gone a few steps from the cart, and was standing in
front of the stable, the door being shut. A goat was munching the shoots
of a starved and dusty vine that clung to the cracked yellow wall of the
house. A cat, squatting on the cream jars, was licking them over. The
fowls, scared by Derville's approach, scuttered away screaming, and the
watch-dog barked.

"And the man who decided the victory at Eylau is to be found here!" said
Derville to himself, as his eyes took in at a glance the general effect
of the squalid scene.

The house had been left in charge of three little boys. One, who had
climbed to the top of the cart loaded with hay, was pitching stones into
the chimney of a neighboring house, in the hope that they might fall
into a saucepan; another was trying to get a pig into a cart, to hoist
it by making the whole thing tilt. When Derville asked them if M.
Chabert lived there, ne