where for more than a quarter of a century all the little suburban
ragamuffins have been in the habit of wearing out the seats of their
breeches.

The strangeness of the place is increased by the circumstance that
wandering gipsies, by a sort of traditional custom always select the
vacant portions of it for their encampments. Whenever any caravan
arrives at Plassans it takes up its quarters on the Aire Saint-Mittre.
The place is consequently never empty. There is always some strange band
there, some troop of wild men and withered women, among whom groups of
healthy-looking children roll about on the grass. These people live
in the open air, regardless of everybody, setting their pots boiling,
eating nameless things, freely displaying their tattered garments, and
sleeping, fighting, kissing, and reeking with mingled filth and misery.

The field, formerly so still and deserted, save for the buzzing of
hornets around the rich blossoms in the heavy sunshine, has thus become
a very rowdy spot, resounding with the noisy quarrels of the gipsies and
the shrill cries of the urchins of the suburb. In one corner there is a
primitive saw-mill for cutting the timber, the noise from which serves
as a dull, continuous bass accompaniment to the sharp voices. The wood
is placed on two high tressels, and a couple of sawyers, one of whom
stands aloft on the timber itself, while the other underneath is half
blinded by the falling sawdust, work a large saw to and fro for
hours together, with rigid machine-like regularity, as if they were
wire-pulled puppets. The wood they saw is stacked, plank by plank, along
the wall at the end, in carefully arranged piles six or eight feet high,
which often remain there several seasons, and constitute one of the
charms of the Aire Saint-Mittre. Between these stacks are mysterious,
retired little alleys leading to a broader path between the timber and