The door opened from the street into the corner of a stone-paved courtyard, and one came under the shelter of a couple of square yards of mud roofing supported upon pillars. Behind the door were a couple of articles like big earthenware shovels, upon the ground. This was the kitchen. The strip from here to the opposite end of the yard was occupied by flower-beds containing hollyhocks and roses, and a cistern raised a foot above the ground-level. The house, standing opposite, was a two-storeyed one of three rooms below, each opening from the yard by a door, too low for a boy of twelve to enter erect. The best of these rooms, the centre one, boasted a second pair of doors, glazed, and the ceiling was made of short boards, the remains of sugar-boxes. The interior was washed in pinkish mud over the yellow underneath, and the ground was as that of the unpaved alley outside. Upstairs, however, the architect had shown his skill. The best room, which jutted out from the frontage line some six feet, was whitened entirely with burnt gypsum, and ornamented by fresco and dado in raised patterns of that material. The pillars between the wall-recesses bore inlaid mirrors, and the ceiling was painted in flowers and stars with scraps of looking-glass here and there in patterns. Three double glass doors with the glass set in huge fretwork patterns looked out over the yard, and the fourth, a wooden door of walnut and oak, opened into the middle room or verandah, from which steps of remarkable inequality descended to the yard. The supporting pillars of the roof of this portico--which replaced the fourth wall--were tree-trunks enclosed in narrow walnut planks, making them octagonal, with long narrow mirrors a foot high inserted at eye height. The ceiling was boarded. The third room would have been like the best one, had not the owner died before he could finish his house, and it had remained in yellow mud and beamed ceiling; and the doors, put in afterwards, were of plain white glass. [Sidenote: RENT A HOUSE]