"Wait till you see the inhabitants--they'll enlighten you--the hags and
the nautical gentlemen along the basins and quays. They've discovered
the secret that if cleanliness is next to godliness, dirt and the devil
are likewise near neighbors. Awful set--those Honfleur sailors The
Havre and Seine people call them Chinamen, they are so unlike the rest
of France and Frenchmen."

"Why are they so unlike?" asked Charm.

"They're so low down, so hideously wicked; they're like the old houses,
a rotten, worm-eaten set--you'll see."

Charm stopped him then, with a gesture. She stopped the horse also; she
brought the whole establishment to a standstill; and then she nodded
her head briskly forward. We were in the midst of the Honfleur
streets--streets that were running away from a wide open space, in all
possible directions. In the centre of the square rose a curious, an
altogether astonishing structure. It was a tower, a belfry doubtless, a
house, a shop, and a warehouse, all in one; such a picturesque medley,
in fact, as only modern irreverence, in its lawless disregard of
original purpose and design, can produce. The low-timbered sub-base of
the structure was pierced by a lovely doorway with sculptured lintel,
and also with two impertinent modern windows, flaunting muslin
curtains, and coquettishly attired with rows of flowering carnations.
Beneath these windows was a shop. Above the whole rose, in beautiful
symmetrical lines, a wooden belfry, tapering from a square tower into a
delicately modelled spire. To complete and accentuate the note of the
picturesque, the superstructure was held in its place by rude modern
beams, propping the tower with a naive disregard of decorative