"Pshaw!" you say, "I know what it is. A bleared,
bandy ruin. Some old house!"

In the first place it is not an old house, it is very much
worse, it is a new house.

Really, now, an old house! You counted upon an old
house and turned up your nose at it in advance. Ah! yes,
old houses; don't you wish you may get them! A
dilapidated, tumble-down cottage! Why, don't you know
that a dilapidated, tumble-down cottage is simply charming,
a thing of beauty? The wall is of beautiful, warm and strong
colour, with moth holes, birds' nests, old nails on which the
spider hangs his rose-window web, a thousand amusing
things that break its evenness. The window is only a
dormer, but from it protrude long poles on which all sorts
of clothing, of all sorts of colours, hang and dry in the
wind-white tatters, red rags, flags of poverty that give to
the hut an air of gaiety and are resplendent in the sunshine.
The door is cracked and black, but approach and examine
it; you will without doubt find upon it a bit of antique
ironwork of the time of Louis XIII., cut out like a piece
of guipure. The roof is full of crevices, but in each crevice
there is a convolvulus that will blossom in the spring, or a
daisy that will bloom in the autumn. The tiles are patched
with thatch. Of course they are, I should say so! It affords
the occasion to have on one's roof a colony of pink
dragon flowers and wild marsh-mallow. A fine green grass
carpets the foot of this decrepit wall, the ivy climbs
joyously up it and cloaks its bareness--its wounds and its