but, the cutler’s knives and axes were sharp and bright, the

smith’s hammers were heavy, and the gunmaker’s stock was

murderous. The crippling stones of the pavement, with their many

little reservoirs of mud and water, had no footways, but broke off

abruptly at the doors. The kennel, to make amends, ran down the

middle of the streetwhen it ran at all: which was only after heavy

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rains, and then it ran, by many eccentric fits, into the houses.

Across the streets, at wide intervals, one clumsy lamp was slung

by a rope and pulley; at night, when the lamplighter had let these

down, and lighted, and hoisted them again, a feeble grove of dim

wicks swung in a sickly manner overhead, as if they were at sea.

Indeed they were at sea, and the ship and crew were in peril of

tempest.

For, the time was to come, when the gaunt scarecrows of that

region should have watched the lamplighter, in their idleness and

hunger, so long, as to conceive the idea of improving on his

method, and hauling up men by those ropes and pulleys, to flare

upon the darkness of their condition. But, the time was not come

yet; and every wind that blew over France shook the rags of the

scarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine of song and feather, took no

warning.

The wine-shop was a corner shop, better than most others in its

appearance and degree, and the master of the wine-shop had

stood outside it, in a yellow waistcoat and green breeches, looking

on at the struggle for the lost wine. “It’s not my affair,” said he,

with a final shrug of the shoulders. “The people from the market

did it. Let them bring another.”

There, his eyes happening to catch the tall joker writing up his

joke, he called to him across the way:

“Say, then, my Gaspard, what do you do there?”

The fellow pointed to his joke with immense significance, as is

often the way with his tribe. It missed its mark, and completely

failed, as is often the way with his tribe too.

“What now? Are you a subject for the mad hospital?” said the

wine-shop keeper, crossing the road, and obliterating the jest with

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a handful of mud, picked up for the purpose, and smeared over it.

“Why do you write in the public streets? Is theretell me thouis

there no other place to write such words in?”

In his expostulation he dropped his cleaner hand (perhaps

accidentally, perhaps not) upon the joker’s heart. The joker

rapped it with his own, took a nimble spring upward, and came

down in a fantastic dancing attitude, with one of his stained shoes

jerked off his foot into his hand, and held out. A joker of an

extremely, not to say wolfishly practical character, he looked,

under those circumstances.

“Put it on, put it on,” said the other. “Call wine, wine; and finish

there.” With that advice, he wiped his soiled hand upon the joker’s

dress, such as it wasquite deliberately, as having dirtied the