Time passed, if that may be called time which we have to measure with a clock.  The apothecary of the rue Royale found better ways of measurement.  As quietly as a spider he was spinning information into knowledge and knowledge into what is supposed to be wisdom; whether it was or not we shall see.  His unidentified merchant friend who had adjured him to become acclimated as “they all did” had also exhorted him to study the human mass of which he had become a unit; but whether that study, if pursued, was sweetening and ripening, or whether it was corrupting him, that friend did not come to see; it was the busy time of year.  Certainly so young a solitary, coming among a people whose conventionalities were so at variance with his own door-yard ethics, was in sad danger of being unduly—­as we might say—­Timonized.  His acquaintances continued to be few in number.

During this fermenting period he chronicled much wet and some cold weather.  This may in part account for the uneventfulness of its passage; events do not happen rapidly among the Creoles in bad weather.  However, trade was good.

But the weather cleared; and when it was getting well on into the Creole spring and approaching the spring of the almanacs, something did occur that extended Frowenfeld’s acquaintance without Doctor Keene’s assistance.

CHAPTER XIII

A CALL FROM THE RENT-SPECTRE

It is nearly noon of a balmy morning late in February.  Aurore Nancanou and her daughter have only this moment ceased sewing, in the small front room of No. 19 rue Bienville.  Number 19 is the right-hand half of a single-story, low-roofed tenement, washed with yellow ochre, which it shares generously with whoever leans against it.  It sits as fast on the ground as a toad.  There is a kitchen belonging to it somewhere among the weeds in the back yard, and besides this room where the ladies are, there is, directly behind it, a sleeping apartment.  Somewhere back of this there is a little nook where in pleasant weather they eat.  Their cook and housemaid is the plain person who attends them on the street.  Her bedchamber is the kitchen and her bed the floor.  The house’s only other protector is a hound, the aim of whose life is to get thrust out of the ladies’ apartments every fifteen minutes.

Yet if you hastily picture to yourself a forlorn-looking establishment, you will be moving straight away from the fact.  Neatness, order, excellence, are prevalent qualities in all the details of the main house’s inward garniture.  The furniture is old-fashioned, rich, French, imported.  The carpets, if not new, are not cheap, either.  Bits of crystal and silver, visible here and there, are as bright as they are antiquated; and one or two portraits, and the picture of Our Lady of Many Sorrows, are passably good productions.  The brass work, of which there is much, is brilliantly burnished, and the front room is bright and cheery.