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The reader has probably not forgotten that a part of the Cour de Miracles was enclosed by the ancient hich surrounded the city, a goodly nuun, even at that epoch, to fall to ruin One of these towers had been converted into a pleasure resort by the vagabonds There was a drain-shop in the underground story, and the rest in the upper stories This was the most lively, and consequently the most hideous, point of the whole outcast den It was a sort of ht, when the reer alighted in the dingy façades of the Place, when not a cry was any longer to be heard proceeding from those innumerable families, those ant-hills of thieves, of wenches, and stolen or bastard children, the nizable by the noise which itsimultaneously from the air-holes, the s, the fissures in the cracked walls, escaped, so to speak, from its every pore

The cellar then, was the drah a low door and by a staircase as steep as a classic Alexandrine Over the door, by way of a sign there hung anew sons and dead chickens, with this, pun below: ~Aux sonneurs pour les trépassés~,--The wringers for the dead

~Sols neufs: poulets tués~

One evening when the curfeas sounding froht have observed, had it been granted to them to enter the formidable Court of Miracles, that abonds' tavern, thatOutside in the Place, there, were reat plan is being fraed in sharpening a villanous iron blade on a paving-stone

Meanwhile, in the tavern itself, wine and ga offered such a powerful diversion to the ideas which occupied the vagabonds' lair that evening, that it would have been difficult to divine from the remarks of the drinkers, as the ayer air than was their wont, and sos of each of theed sword or the hook of an old hackbut

The room, circular in form, was very spacious; but the tables were so thickly set and the drinkers so numerous, that all that the tavern contained, , all that were sleeping, all that were playing, the well, the lame, seemed piled up pell-mell, with as much order and harmony as a heap of oyster shells There were a few tallow dips lighted on the tables; but the real luminary of this tavern, that which played the part in this dram-shop of the chandelier of an opera house, was the fire