The American Marquis by Nick Carter — page 9: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

SP ne \ \ ww OC ) 3 , > ) CHAPTER I. A MASKED STRANGER. A quaint old town is Morlaix, in Upper Britanny, and full of rambling’ streets and ancient, houses. Away at the end of the Rue Perelle, and standing in deso- late solitude, as if waiting for the sleepy old town to catch up with it, is a dilapidated house. It is abandoned now, and it ought to have been so half a century ago. But it was not. Less than twenty years ago, had the townspeople been | asked who lived there, they would have shrugged their shoulders and spread out their hands in good French fashion and said: “An artist—an American. Pawvre diable!” : *'Phat was all they knew. He was an artist, and an American; so, of course, he was a poor deyil. Clinton Hastings would have said something very like it, _ too, had his opinion of himself been asked. _ More especially had he been asked, one wild November night, as he sat with his eyes intently fixed on the easel be- fore him. A young man, and a handsome one, too, in spite of the _ uneared for curling, brown beard which hid the whole lower _ part of his face. In spite of the threadbare clothes so care- __lessly worn; in spite of the half-reckless, half-gloomy, al- co 4, ; a a - + i e f f "7 ny é aA