closed hermetically, but the upper windows no longer emitted a
scintillation of lamplight. The spy by accident concluded that he would
raise his voice for help all in vain as far as the tradesmen were
concerned. But he was brave, and he let increasing curiosity enchain him
continuously.

From time out of mind the sage in velvet has serenely contemplated
Diogenes in his tub; not that our philosopher seemed the treasurer of an
Alexander!

Ranged at length in a long row, cripples, the blind, the young, the
aged, it was a company of mendicants which eccentric painters would have
given five years of life to have seen. Except for consumptive coughs,
the misstep of a wooden leg of which the clumsy ferule slipped on a
cobblestone, and the querulous whimper of a child, half-starved and
imperfectly swaddled in a tattered shawl, on a flaccid bosom, the mob
were silent in an expectation as intense as the lookers-on. The wind
brought the whistle of the railway locomotives and the clanking of a
steam-dredger in the river, like a giant toiling in massive chains.

For this platoon of vice and misery, crime and disorder, laziness and
rapine, the stranger confidently expected to see a commander appear
whose flashing, fearless eye, and upright, powerful frame, would account
for the awe in which all were held.

What was his amazement, therefore, to perceive--while a tremor of
emotion thrilled the line and announced the commander whom all
awaited--a bent-up, scarcely human-shaped form, hardly to be
acknowledged a woman's. It was enveloped in a heavily furred pelisse
fitted for a man.