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Grandfather had remained there with his parents when he was a little boy; he had never before seen the biggest town in the country. There were so many people in the street that he thought they were going to move the sign-boards, and there were a good many to move : a hundred rooms could have been filled with pictures, if they had been hung indoors instead of outside. Thus there were all sorts ot clothes painted on the tailors' sign-boards : they could make shabbily dressed people into quite grand folks; there were sign-boards outside the tobacco manufacturers' with the most delightful little boys smoking cigars, just as in real life; there were sign-boards on which were painted butter and salted herrings, parsons' ruffs and coffins, with inscriptions and announcements of all kinds. One could easily spend a whole day in going up and down the streets, looking at the pictures till one got tired of it, and at the same time one could learn what sort of people lived in those houses where they had hung out sign- boards ; and, as grandfather said, it was a good thing, and very instructive as well, to know who lived in all the houses in a big town. But just as grandfather came to town what I am about to tell you happened to the sign-boards. He has told me all about it himself, and he was not chaffing me, as mother said he always did when he wanted to "palm off" anything upon me ; he looked as if you could rely upon every word he said. The night he arrived in the big town the weather was the most terrible one had ever read about in the papers — such weather as no one within the memory of man had experienced. The air was filled with tiles ; old palings were blown down ; there was even a wheelbarrow which ran up the street just to save itself The wind howled in the air; it whined and shook everything it came in contact with. It was indeed a terrible storm. The water in the canals splashed over the sides; it did not know what to do with itself. The storm swept over the town, carrying the chimneys along with it. More than one of the noble old church steeples had to lean over, and has never got straight since. Outside the house of the old, respected captain of the fire brigade, who always arrived at a fire with the last engine, stood a sentry-box. The storm begrudged the captain this little box and blew it off its pivot. It rolled down the street, and, strange to say, it righted itself and was left standing outside the house of the foolish carpenter who had saved three lives in the last fire. But the sentry-box did not give that a thought. The barber's sign, the great brazen dish, was torn off and thrown right into the window recess of the judge's, and it seemed almost as if it was done out of malice, said the whole neighborhood, for they and the most intimate friends of the judge's wife called her " the razor," she was so sharp. She knew more about people than they knew themselves. Then flew a sign-board with a dried codfish painted on it. It stuck over the door of a house where there lived a man who wrote in a