Madame Delphine

and to that corner where the flower-women sit at the inner and outer edges of the arcaded sidewalk, and make the air sweet wi

a region of architectural decrepitude, where an ancient and foreign-seeming domestic life, in second stories, overhangs the ruins of a former commercial prosperity, and upon everything has settled down a long Sabbath of decay. The vehicles in the street are few in number, and are merely passing through; the stores are shrunken into shops; you see here and there, li

re-red-painted brick pavement, foliage of dark palm or pale banana, marble or granite masonry and blooming parterres; or through a chink between some pair of heavy bat

proportion are dingy and shabby; but just when these are putting you off your g

t, you will see, as you approach its intersection

eds, and in the fall of the year is gay with the yellow plumes of the golden-rod. You can almost touch with your cane the low edge of the broad, overhanging eaves. The batten shutters at door and window, with hinges like those of a postern, are shut with a grip that makes one's knuckles and nails feel lacerated. Save in the brick-work itself there is not a cranny. You would sa

se, originally of much pretension, but from whose front door har

e is in'abit;

he idea that you wish to know-until, possibly, just as you are turning to depart, your informant, in a sin

quadr

place in former years, when the houses of this region generally

ays of beauty, were facts so generally admitted as to be, even as far back as that sixty years ago, no longer a subject of gossip. She was never pointed out by the denizens of the quarter as a character, nor her house as a "feature.