rent and his companions, although the latter did all they could to call off the dogs. These scenes repeated themselves, tearing away each time a shred of their former intimacy, and Laurent ended by no longer seeing his former faithful friends.
He once more plunged himself deeper and deeper into the extreme quarters exemplified by the loves of the crossing-keeper, frequented the haunts of the city boundaries, the cut-throat dives of Looibroek and Doelhof, the slanting streets of the Stone Mill and of Zurenborg, the sight of which had touched his heart, when he was a child, and inspired him with a curiosity blended with anguish and an unhealthy pity; that eccentric district to the east of the city, actual vestibules of the reformatories, waiting room of the prisons, swarming with moral lepers.
He loafed also about the immense region of the Basins, beginning at the former Palais des Hanseates, stripped of its campanile and imperial eagle, and presenting an uninterrupted succession of quadrangular reservoirs, enormous and solid as the arenas inundated for the naumachies of the Caesars. However, sometimes the boats flocked together in such compact masses that Paridael crossed the docks, dry-footed, as if it were the deck of a boat. Others were being built, larger, deeper, without any delay. Hardly opened, they were already insufficient for the merchant fleets that met there from the four corners of the earth, and anew the metropolis, glorious Messaline of commerce, insatiable and unsatiated, enlarged her bosom to receive these arks of abundance, and, always spurred forward, contested in expansion and in vigor with her copious tributaries.
And navvies from the Polder incessantly struggled
