of merchandise being thrown into the bottom of holds, with the continual fall of calkers' picks.
In order to enlarge the docks, the demolition of the old quarters had been ordered, and the wrecking had begun. Already large pieces of wall were lying crumbled into plaster at the corners of streets; tumbledown houses, disembowelled, cut away from their gables, showed their carcasses of bleeding brick from which hung, like strips of flesh and skin, sad, flapping decorations. They looked like carcasses hung up in butchers' stalls.
Here and there breaches had been made in the blocks of buildings dating back to before the Spanish dominion, in these decaying and unsteady old houses that swayed toward each other like cold old women, brought to light still older constructions, unmasked vestiges of mediæval donjons, unearthed the Roman forts of the first ages of the city.
On a part of the line of the quays that had to be repaired the trees beneath which the two Paridaels had so often walked had already disappeared.
Not only was the glorious Carthage rejecting her surplus population, exiling her people, but, not content with having turned loose her pariahs, she was demolishing and undermining their hovels. She was behaving like a parvenue who rebuilds, and transforms from cellar to roof a noble and ancestral lordly home; discarding or destroying all the relics and vestiges of a glorious past, and replacing picturesque and blueblooded ornaments by a flashy new garb, a showy new luxury and an improvised elegance.
The news of the crimes and vandalism to which the imbecile Rich had delivered over his natal city had chagrined Laurent to the point of making him move
