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decided to cut down the trees of the forest, cover the area with stones and build a house, many houses, on the ground where the well had stood, build a whole town, with markets and stores and people. And this would drive away their monarch's melancholy and banish his longing forever.

Whether the experiment had worked or not-that Madame Dabbie never revealed. Her black eyes would gleam with a strange light and terrorize her listeners into silence. Even her cat and dog would sit as though frozen into immobility; there would be a faint shudder of their fur coats, but that was all.

Seldom did anything happen in Number 13. The tenants were therefore eager to make up for their building's monotony-with all sorts of affairs on the outside, thereby giving the concierge plenty of food for her imagination. And Madame Dabbie relished unfolding each intrigue-in secret, of course.

She herself never left the building. She watched the tenants come and go. She rejoiced when they had good fortune and mourned with them in times of sorrow. She had never taken the time to get married. She never even went to church. She carried on her own domestic existence with her dog and cat, with the colored cushions on her bed, the always-blooming flower-pots, the stairways to be scrubbed daily, and the tenants who trod them. In her sixtieth year she remained just as simple and naive as she had been forty years ago.

The appearance of her own quarters never changed. There, too, nothing was ever soiled or broken or disarranged. Her soul and spirit had remained similarly spotless. She was no more than a grown-up child, with snow-white hair and deep-set black eyes which indicated her Spanish descent. She never thought of people as wicked, but at the same time she could never resist an intense curiosity and a desire to explore