one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that

approached them, had damned it into little pools; these were

surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to

its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands

joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their

shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between their

fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little

mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from

women’s heads, which were squeezed dry into infants’ mouths;

others made small mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it ran;

others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here

and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new

directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed

pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister winerotted

fragments with eager relish. There was no drainage to carry

off the wine, and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud

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got taken up along with it that there might have been a scavenger

in the street, if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in

such a miraculous presence.

A shrill sound of laughter and of amused voicesvoices of men,

women, and childrenresounded in the street while this wine

game lasted. There was little roughness in the sport, and much

playfulness. There was a special companionship in it, and

observable inclination on the part of every one to join some other

one, which led, especially among the luckier or lighter-hearted, to

frolicsome embraces, drinking of healths, shaking of hands, and

even joining of hands and dancing, a dozen together. When the

wine was gone, and the places where it had been most abundant

were raked into a gridiron-pattern by fingers, these

demonstrations ceased, as suddenly as they had broken out. The

man who had left his saw sticking in the firewood he was cutting,

set it in motion again; the woman who had left on a door-step the

little pot of hot ashes, at which she had been trying to soften the

pain in her own starved fingers and toes, or in those of her child,

returned to it; men with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverous

faces, who had emerged into the winter light from cellars, moved

away, to descend again; and a gloom gathered on the scene that

appeared more natural to it than sunshine.

The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the

narrow street in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it

was spilled. It had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and

many naked feet, and many wooden shoes. The hands of the man

who sawed the wood, left red marks on the billets; and the

forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the

stain of the old rag she wound about her head again. Those who

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had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a

tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched,

his head more out of a long squalid bag of a night-cap than in it,