She explained that this Mme. Alexandre was her "neighbor of the next door," and Chester remembered her sign: "Laces and Embroideries." "Scipion," said Castanado to a short, swarthy, broad-bearded man, "I have the honor to make you acquaint' with my friend Mr. Chezter." Chester pressed the enveloping hand of "S. Beloiseau, Artisan in Ornamental Iron-work." "Also, Mr. Chezter, Mr. Rene Ducatel; but with him you are already acquaint', I think, eh?" Chester shook hands with a small, dapper, early-gray, superdignified man, recalling his sign: "Antiques in Furniture, Glass, Bronze, Plate, China, and Jewelry." M. Ducatel seemed to be already taking leave. His "anceztral 'ome," he said, was far up-town; he had dropped in solely to borrow--showing it--the _Courrier des Etats-Unis_. That journal, Castanado remarked to Chester as at a corner table he poured him a glass of cordial, brought the war, the trenches, the poilu and the boche closer than any other they knew. Beloiseau and Mme. Alexandre, he softly explained, had come in quite unlooked-for to discuss the great strife and might depart at any moment. Then the reading! But Chester himself interested those two and they stayed. When he said that Beloiseau's sidewalk samples had often made him covet some excuse for going in and seeing both the stock and the craftsman, "That was excuse ab-undant!" was the prompt response, and Castanado put in: "Scipion he'd rather, always, a non-buying connoisseur than a buying Philistine." "Come any day! any hour!" said Beloiseau. Presently all five were talking of the surviving poetry of both artistic and historic Royal Street. "Twenty year' ag-o," said the ironworker, "looking down-street from my shop, there was not a building in sight without a romantic story. My God! for example, that Hotel St. Louis!" Chester--"had heard one or two of its episodes only the evening before, at that up-town dinner, from a fine old down-town Creole, a fellow guest, with whom he was to dine the next week." "Aha-a-a! precizely ac-rozz the street from Mme. Alexandre!" said the hostess. "M'sieu' et Madame De l'Isle! Now I detec' that!" "Have they no son?--or--or daughter?" he asked. "Not any," Mme. Alexandre broke in with a significant sparkle; "juz' the two al-lone." "They live over my shop," Beloiseau said. "You muz' know that double gate nex' adjoining me." "Oh, that lovely piece of ironwork? I took that for a part of your establishment." "I have only the uze of it with them. My _grandpere_ he made those gate', for the father of Mme. De l'Isle, same year he made those great openwork gate' of Hotel St. Louis. You speak of episode'! One summer, renovating that hotel, they paint' those gate'--of iron openwork--in imitation--_mon Dieu_!--of marbl'! _Ciel_! the tragedy of _that_! Yes, they live over me; in the whole square, both side' the street, last remaining of the 'igh society."