The neighborhood is one long since given up to fifth-rate shops, whose
masters and mistresses display such enticing mottoes as "_Au gagne
petit!_" Innumerable children swarm about, and, by some charm of the
place, are not run over, but obstruct the sidewalks playing their
clamorous games.
The building is a thing of many windows, where passably good-looking
women appear and disappear, clad in cotton gowns, watering little
outside shelves of flowers and cacti, or hanging canaries' cages. Their
husbands are keepers in wine-warehouses, rent-collectors for the agents
of old Frenchmen who have been laid up to dry in Paris, custom-house
supernumeraries and court-clerks' deputies (for your second-rate Creole
is a great seeker for little offices). A decaying cornice hangs over,
dropping bits of mortar on passers below, like a boy at a
boarding-house.
The landlord is one Kookoo, an ancient Creole of doubtful purity of
blood, who in his landlordly old age takes all suggestions of repairs as
personal insults.
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