Street, Gastigny Place, and part of Bath Street, while the number of inmates was reduced to sixty—that is to say, about twenty men and forty women, all of whom were to be above sixty years of age, of French extraction, and professing the Protestant religion. It was a queer old range of building, that retreat; pleasant enough, perhaps, when as a rather blank series of red brick houses, it looked across its own formal walled garden to the pleasant fields and open country, but strangely silent, and with a crumbling, dreary look about it, when the lunatic asylum of St. Luke's dominated all the surrounding tenements of a crowded, sordid neighbourhood. Only the initiated could easily find the little low black door that opened in the bare wall, and led to the large irregular space, which was laid out in weedy beds and stony borders, distinguished by an air of decay rather than of production—especially where in certain dank corners a tangle of sapless stalks and tendrils indicated some faintly hopeful attempt to rear an arbour, in which persons of robust imagination might fancy they were sheltered from impending blacks that issued from the manufactory chimneys close by. The visitor to this out-of-the-way corner of the great city, seeing the old people walking up and down the paved causeway in front of the row of crooked-paned lower windows, or airing themselves at the doorsteps, might be excused for the fancy that they had the imaginative faculty of children; {23} and were expected to "make believe" a good deal before they could quite reconcile themselves to the notion that this dingy area of quadrilateral plots and paths, in which the wet stood in small puddles, was ever a "pleasaunce" gay with garden blooms, and smelling of knotted marjoram and fragrant thyme. Yet there were still evidences of the invincible cheerfulness of the old French nature, among the old creatures with faces streaked like winter apples, and hands which, even though they trembled, were swift of gesture and of emphasis.