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Some call it Black-beetle Hole, and then again some call it the Hole of the Black-beetles. 'Yer after no good, Mr. Fitzgerald, says Mrs. McQuade, whose husband keeps the junk-shop over the Hole, putting her malicious face out of the window. "'You're the woman I want, Mrs. McQuade, says I. 'Don't be puttin' your foot in the house, says she.

Summer scorched them, winter humped their backs with cold and arched up their bellies with famine, but they were a breed schooled through generations for this fight against nature. In this junk-shop of the world, rattlesnakes were rulers of the soil. Overhead the buzzards, ominous black specks pendant against the white-hot sky, ruled the air.

But after they squeezed through the hedge, they found in front of them, between the box and the edge of the woods, a little patch of muddy, uncultivated land, devoted to the refuse of a farm. A trash heap, a broken plough, empty boxes, barrels, broken china, and other useless things betokened a sort of rustic junk-shop a receptacle for objects which had seen their best days.

At the darkest point on the street the two boys had to pass a collection of shanty like buildings, which contained a contractor's offices, a junk-shop, a second hand dealer's storehouse and a big stable in which the contractor's work-horses were kept.

Men who are kept by a commonplace-book go about raking everywhere for glittering scraps, which they carry home to be sorted in their æsthetic junk-shop. Any portable bit that strikes the fancy is a thought. There are literary rag-pickers of every degree of ability; and a great deal of judgment can be shown in finding the scrap or nail you want in a heap of rubbish.

One recalls the mouse-like activities of the Brothers Dutuit, unearthing here a gorgeous enamel, retrieving there a Rembrandt drawing, fetching out a Gothic ivory from a junk-shop. One sighs for those days, and declares that they are forever past. Does not the sage M. Eudel warn us that there are no more finds "Surtout ne comptez plus sur les trouvailles."

The Proud Parent was steered to a faded Boarding House and found himself in a Chamber of Horrors that seemed to be a Cross between a Junk-Shop and a Turkish Corner. Here he found the College Desperado known as "Old Buck," attired in a Bath-Robe, plunking a stingy little Mandolin and smoking a Cigarette that smelled as if somebody had been standing too close to the Stove.

Stires had shut up his junk-shop for a time and stayed strictly at home. I went to see him, the day after they found her. His face was drawn and gloomy, but it was the face of a man in his right mind. I think his worst time was that hour after Follet had followed Ching Po out of his warehouse.

This room is a junk-shop of new, useless, unattractive objects of no virtue, in short, a most unpleasant place in which to live. Have you ever considered what gives even the simplest clothes for distinctive occasions a beauty of their own? It is fitness. And it is this same fitness which tells so much in furnishing a room.

"It's a sort of little junk-shop with a ramshackle house attached, all cellars and rabbit-hutches, as you might say, overhanging a disused cutting which is filled at high tide. Opium is to be had there and card-playing goes on, and I won't swear that you couldn't get liquor. But it's well conducted as such dives go."