story, the venerable old town was rapidly subsiding to her natural level of obscurity.
On a bright June morning, in the year last mentioned, a woman of thirty-five or six sat at the bow-window of a house in the decrepid old town. Like the little capital of which it formed a part, the tenement "had seen better days;" for it was somewhat dilapidated now, and wore that threadbare aspect which distinguishes most men who have fallen into the same lamentable category. The gloom which attends decay was, however, in some degree relieved by the cheerful notes of two or three song-birds that hung above the woman's head, and the fresh green vines which tenderly concealed the ravages of time. The occupant herself did not disturb the harmony of character which made the place so pleasing to the eye; for the scrupulous neatness of her dress was apparently designed to compensate for plainness of material; and though the touch of years had evidently been upon her figure, the memory of its youthful contour yet lingered in its well-preserved and flowing outline.
The street upon which she looked was a straggling thoroughfare, that seemed to have been formed by a tumultuous and disorderly recession of the crowd of many-gabled houses. As the whole town was quaint, dingy, irregular, and crumbling, so the street was of no particular width, full of odd corners, crooked, interrupted, and not very well swept. But also, as the town was cheerful, vine-clothed, redolent of flowers, and jubilant with the songs of unnumbered birds, so the street was vocal with the silvery voices of bright-eyed and half-naked children, who played merrily with whole packs of sleek and worthies but good-natured curs; while fist and delighted grand-mères gazed smiling from the open windows, on the gambols of their bare-legged posterity. Gay, light-hearted groups passed to and fro along the crooked passages, and black-eyed girls in dishabille flashed flittingly from house to house, or, singing sweetly as their charges, fed troops of gayly-plumed Canaries, or vied in liquidness of tone with that full-blooded Frenchman, the mocking-bird. The morning sun streamed down the openings, and gilding rusty porticos, and penetrating tangled vine-clusters, sharply defined the peaked shadows, and poured in golden richness into open casements.
