posts all along the sides; and high fantastic walls (where it was
_defendre d'afficher_), with bits of old battlement at the top, and
overhanging boughs of sycamore and lime, and behind them gray old
gardens that dated from the days of Louis le Hutin and beyond! And
suggestive names printed in old rusty iron letters at the street
corners--"Rue Videgousset," "Rue Coupe-gorge," "Rue de la Vieille
Truanderie," "Impasse de la Tour de Nesle," etc., that appealed to the
imagination like a chapter from Hugo or Dumas.

And the way to these was by long, tortuous, busy thoroughfares, most
irregularly flagged, and all alive with strange, delightful people in
blue blouses, brown woollen tricots, wooden shoes, red and white cotton
nightcaps, rags and patches; most graceful girls, with pretty,
self-respecting feet, and flashing eyes, and no head-dress but their own
hair; gay, fat hags, all smile; thin hags, with faces of appalling
wickedness or misery; precociously witty little gutter-imps of either
sex; and such cripples! jovial hunchbacks, lusty blind beggars, merry
creeping paralytics, scrofulous wretches who joked and punned about
their sores; light-hearted, genial, mendicant monsters without arms or
legs, who went ramping through the mud on their bellies from one
underground wine-shop to another; and blue-chinned priests and
barefooted brown monks and demure Sisters of Charity, and here and there
a jolly chiffonnier with his hook, and his knap-basket behind; or a
cuirassier, or a gigantic carbineer, or gay little "Hunter of Africa,"
or a couple of bold gendarmes riding abreast, with their towering black
_bonnets a poil;_ or a pair of pathetic little red-legged soldiers,
conscripts just fresh from the country, with innocent light eyes and
straw-coloured hair and freckled brown faces, walking hand in hand, and
staring at all the pork-butchers' shops--and sometimes at the
pork-butcher's wife!