She pointed to a hideous old harridan standing on the opposite pavement, her bare arms resting on her hips, and a greasy yellow kerchief twisted turban-wise round her head. My heart sank. Noemi must be very poor, or very unfortunate, to live under the same roof with such an old sorciere! Nevertheless, I crossed the street, and accosted the hag with a smile. "Good-day, Maman Paquet. Can you tell me anything of your lodger, Noemi Bergeron?" "Hein?" She was deaf and surly. I repeated my question in a louder key. "I know nothing of her," she answered, in a voice that sounded like the croak of a frog. "She couldn't pay me her rent, and I told her to be off. Maybe she's drowned by this." "You turned her out?" I cried. "Yes, turned her out," repeated the hag, with a savage oath. "It was her own fault; she might have sold her beast of a poodle to pay me, and she wouldn't. Why not, I should like to know,--she sold everything else she had!" "And you can tell me nothing about her now,--you know no more than that?" "Nothing. Go and find her!" She muttered a curse, glared at me viciously, and hobbled off. I had turned to depart in another direction, when a skinny hand suddenly clutched my arm, and looking round, I found that Maman Paquet had followed and overtaken me. "You know the girl," she squeaked, eyeing me greedily,--"will you pay her rent? She owed me a month's lodging, seven francs." She looked so loathsome and horrible with her withered evil face so close to mine that I gave a gesture of disgust and shook her off as though she had been a toad. "No," said I, quickening my steps; "she is a stranger to me, and my pockets are empty." Maman Paquet flung a curse after me, more foul and emphatic than the last, and went her way blaspheming. I returned home to Pepin saddened and disquieted. "So, after all," I said to him, "your owner belongs to the fair sex! But, heaven! in what misery she and you must have lived! And yet you cried for her, Pepin!" Not long after these incidents--three or four days at the latest-- a party of my fellow-students came to smoke with me, and as the shell always sounds of the sea, our conversation naturally savoured of our professional pursuits. We discussed our hospital chefs, their crotchets, their inventions, their medical successes, their politics; we criticised new methods of operation, related anecdotes of the theatre and consulting-room, and speculated on the chances of men about to go up for examination. Then we touched on the subject of obscure diseases, unusual mental conditions, prolonged delirium, and kindred topics. It was at this point that one of us, Eugene Grellois, a house-surgeon at a neighbouring hospital, remarked,--