Excerpt from The Cat and Battledore and Other Tales IN the middle of the Rue St. Denis almost at the corner of the Rue du Petit Lion, there formerly stood one of those precious houses which render it easy for the historian, with the aid of analogy, to reproduce old Paris. The menacing walls of the rickety old building seemed to have been spattered with hiero glyphics, for hieroglyphics is the only word that the watchful idler could apply to the X's and V's traced upon the facade by the horizontal or diagonal pieces of wood whose course was marked in the whitewash by small parallel chinks. It was obvious that the passage of the lightest vehicle would cause every one of these beams to tremble in its socket. The ve ner able building was surmounted by a triangular roof of a kind of which very soon not a single example will be left in Paris. This roof, stained by the inclemency of a Parisian atmosphere, overhung the street to a distance of three feet, as much for the purpose of protecting the doorstep from rain-water, as for afford ing cover to the wall of an attic with its sill-less window. This last storey was built of planks nailed one upon the other, like scales; in order, doubtless, not to over-weight the frail erec tion. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.