Seven stories with basement and attic Author:Donald Grant Mitchell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THIRD STORY: The Petit Soulier. MY old friend the Abbe G , who on my earliest visit to Paris, not only taught me French, but put me in the way of a gr... more »eat deal of familiar talk- practice with hia pleasant bourgeois friends, lived in a certain dark corner of a hotel in the Rue de Seine, or in the Rue de la Harpe; which of the two it was I really forget. At any rate, the hotel was very old, and the street out of which I used to step into its ill-paved triangular court was very narrow, and very dirty. At the end of the court, farthest from the entrance- way, was the box of the concierge, who was a brisk little shoe-maker, forever bethwacking his lap-stone. If I remember rightly, the hammer of this little cordon- nier made the only sound that broke the stillness within ; for though the hotel was full of lodgers, I think I never saw two of them together; and it is quite cer tain, that even in mid-summer, no voices were ever to be heard talking across the court. At this distance of time, I do not think it would be possible for me to describe accurately all the winding? of the corridor which led to the Abbe's door. I remember that the first part was damp and low—that after it, came a sweaty old stairway of stone ; and once arrived at the top of this, I used to traverse an open-sided gallery which looked down upon a quiet interior court; then came a little wooden wicket, dank with long hand ling—which when it opened tinkled a bell. Sometimes the Abbe would hear the bell, and open his door, down at the end of some farther passage ; and sometimes a lodger, occupying a room that looked upon the last mentioned court, would draw slyly a corner of his curtain, and peep out to see who might be passing. Occasionally I would amuse myself by giving to the little warning bell an u...« less