The abode of Herr Wyburg was situated in the oldest part of Hamburg, where the streets are narrow, crowded, irregular, and, if picturesque, squalid. They are generally of great height, built in the Dutch fashion of brick and wood, and those inhabited by the lower orders have their narrow windows so near each other as to give them the aspect of huge manufactories, but with a heavy and gloomy character about them. Many of these brick-nogging, tumble-down dwellings are admirable subjects for the pencil. Numerous canals called _Fleethen_ intersect this quarter, and run along the backs of the houses, giving the streets a resemblance to those of Holland. In summer the muddy exhalations from these are very unwholesome, and might prove pestilential, were it not for the agitation in them caused by the current of the Elbe. In this odious and unsavoury, but picturesque part of the city, which escaped the great fire of 1842, and which has undergone little change since the days of the Hanseatic League, the back wall of Herr Wyburg's house was washed by the waters of the Fleethen, while on one side it was isolated from the haggard district in which it stood by a large market-garden. The original frame of the house had been altogether wood--Baltic pine--but would seem to have been patched and repaired with bricks. The arms of Holstein and Schleswig, the nettleleaf and two lions respectively, were reproduced in various parts of it, for in other times it had been a residence of the old Counts of Holstein, the ancient Lords of Hamburg, a dignity claimed by the Kings of Denmark till 1768; but in rank it had come sorely down in the world, just as in Scottish towns we find the ancient abodes of nobility, and even of royalty, now abandoned to the squalid and the poor. Its walls were in some places panelled with almost black mahogany, quaintly, if uncouthly, carved, and much discoloured by damp from the adjacent Fleethen. The windows were high, jealously grated with iron, and admitted but a foggy kind of light, even by noonday, and the whole edifice had a general aspect of dreariness and desolation that sunk like a weight on the young heart of Ellinor Wellwood. The back windows alone were ungrated, but then they overlooked the Fleethen, that system of canals and intersecting ditches which conceal many a crime, and where the body of the murdered--if found before being swept into the Elbe--passes often for that of a suicide. When Wyburg withdrew with Sir Redmond, he offered that worthy his hand, but the latter ignored the action, and did not respond to it. In this he only acted 'snobbishly,' not because he knew the other to be a finished rascal; and over the face of the latter there passed a flush of rage and affront, while a dangerous gleam came into his watery eyes. 'It is no use, Sir Redmond, your attempting to come the fine or arrogant gentleman over me,' said Herr Wyburg; 'you and I are too old acquaintances for that.'