The jurors had now reached one of the houses which they had to visit. They finished their work in a quarter of an hour, and then resumed their walk. By degrees they no longer felt so much disgust for the mud; they walked in the middle of the pools, abandoning the hope of keeping their boots clean. When they had passed the Rue Ménilmontant one of the commercial men, the ex-knife-grinder, became nervous. He examined the ruins about him, and no longer recognised the neighbourhood. He said that he had lived in that part, on his arrival in Paris more than thirty years previously, and that he should be very pleased to find the house again. He continued searching with his eyes, when suddenly the sight of a house which the workmen's picks had already cut in twain, made him stop short in the middle of the road. He studied the door and the windows. Then, pointing upward with his finger to a corner of the partially demolished building: "There it is," he cried; "I recognise it!" "What, pray?" asked the doctor. "My room, of course! That's it!" It was a little room, situated on the fifth floor, and it must have formerly overlooked a courtyard. A breach in the wall showed it, quite bare, already demolished on one side, with a broad torn band of its wall paper, of a large yellow flowery pattern, trembling in the wind. On the left hand, one could still see the recess of a cupboard, lined with blue paper, and beside it was an aperture for a stove-pipe, with a bit of piping in it. The ex-workman was seized with emotion: "I spent five years in there," muttered he. "My means were small in those times, but no matter, I was young. You see the cupboard; it was there that I put by three hundred francs, copper by copper. And the hole for the stove-pipe, I can still remember the day when I made it. The room had no fire-place, and it was bitter cold, all the more so as we were not often two together." "Come, come," interrupted the doctor, joking, "we don't ask you for your secrets. You played your games like every one else." "That's true," naively resumed the worthy man. "I still remember an ironing girl who lived over the way. You see the bed was over there, on the right hand side near the window. Ah! my poor room, how they've knocked it about." He was really very sad. "Come," said Saccard, "no harm's done by throwing those old cabins down. Handsome houses in freestone will be built in place of them. Would you still live in such a den while you might very well lodge yourself on the new Boulevard?" "That's true," again replied the manufacturer, who seemed quite consoled.