This powerful merchant's house is in the marketplace. It rises five stories high, and is built of beams filled in with laths, mortar, and stucco. On the ground floor are storerooms for costly Oriental goods, and desks where the master's clerks seem forever busy with complicated accounts. On the next are the rooms for the family, and, although without the spacious magnificence of the great hall at St. Aliquis, Adela remarks a little enviously that her host's wife enjoys many comforts and luxuries hardly known in the castle. The upper stories are full of small chambers for Othon's family, his clerks, and the younger apprentices who are learning his business. Before the front door swings the ensign of the house--a gilded mortar (in token of the powdered spices which the owner sells). The houses of Pontdebois have no numbers. The ensigns serve to identify them. One of Othon's neighbors lives at the "Crouching Cat," another at the "Tin Pot," another at the "Silver Fish," and so on all through the town. The house of Othon also appears to be quite new, as do many others. This, however, is a doubtful sign of good fortune. Only a few years ago much of Pontdebois was burned down. The narrow streets, the thatched roofs, the absence of any means of checking a blaze save a line of buckets hastily organized, make great fires a standing menace to every city.[106] Othon complains that at any moment he may be reduced almost to beggary by the carelessness of some wretched scullery maid or tavern apprentice. He will also say that somehow in the pent-up city there is greater danger of the plague than in the country castles or even in the villages with their dungheaps. A dozen years ago Pontdebois lost a quarter of its population by an outbreak which spared neither rich nor poor, before which physicians and religious processions seemed alike helpless, and which demoralized the community before the saints mercifully halted the devastation. [Sidenote: The Communal Donjon] There are only a few stone houses in Pontdebois. Even the best houses of the citizens are usually of wood and mortar. Not yet have risen those magnificent stone city halls which later will be the glory of North France and Flanders. But on one side of the market place rises the communal donjon. The Good Town is like a seigneur (indeed, somewhat it _is_ a seigneur placed in commission): it has its walls and therefore its strong citadel. The donjon forms a high, solid, square tower dominating the public square. At its summit there is always a watchman ready, at first danger of fire or attack, to boom the alarm bell. The tower itself is large enough to have good-sized rooms in its base. Nearest the ground is the council chamber where the worshipful echevins can deliberate. Above that is the archive room, where the elaborate town records are kept. Directly under the council chamber, however, is the prison, where general offenders are mewed up no more comfortably than in the abysses of St. Aliquis.