After long study of the caprices and capers of tenants who persisted,
after the fashion of dynasties, in upsetting the arrangements of their
predecessors, he had drawn up a charter of his own and followed it
religiously. In accordance therewith, the old fellow made no repairs:
no chimney ever smoked, the stairs were clean, the ceilings white, the
cornices irreproachable, the floors firm on their joists, the paint
satisfactory; the locks were never more than three years old, not a
pane of glass was missing, there were no cracks, and he saw no broken
tiles until a tenant vacated the premises. When he met the tenants on
their first arrival he was accompanied by a locksmith and a painter
and glazier,--very convenient folks, as he remarked. The lessee was at
liberty to make improvements; but if the unhappy man did so, little
Molineux thought night and day of how he could dislodge him and relet
the improved appartement on better terms. He watched and waited and
spun the web of his mischievous legal proceedings. He knew all the
tricks of Parisian legislation in the matter of leases. Factious and
fond of scribbling, he wrote polite and specious letters to his
tenants; but at the bottom of all his civil sentences could be seen,
as in his faded and cozening face, the soul of a Shylock. He always
demanded six months' rent in advance, to be deducted from the last
quarter of the lease under an array of prickly conditions which he
invented. If new tenants offered themselves, he got information about
them from the police; for he would not have people of certain
callings,--he was afraid, for instance, of hammers. When the lease was
to be signed, he kept the deed and spelled it over for a week, fearing
what he called the _et caetera_ of lawyers.

Outside of his notions as a proprietor, Jean-Baptiste Molineux seemed
good and obliging. He played at boston without complaining of the