hemselves into
their houses as into a fortress.

Examining the interior, which, during the first twenty years of this
century, was encumbered with old iron and brass, tires of wheels,
springs, bells, anything in short which the destruction of buildings
afforded of old metals, persons interested in the relics of the old town
noticed signs of the flue of a forge, shown by a long trail of soot,--a
minor detail which confirmed the conjecture of archaeologists as to the
original use to which the building was put. On the first floor (above
the ground-floor) was one room and the kitchen; on the floor above that
were two bedrooms. The garret was used to put away articles more choice
and delicate than those that lay pell-mell about the shop.

This house, hired in the first instance, was subsequently bought by a
man named Sauviat, a hawker or peddler who, from 1786 to 1793, travelled
the country over a radius of a hundred and fifty miles around Auvergne,
exchanging crockery of a common kind, plates, dishes, glasses,--in
short, the necessary articles of the poorest households,--for old iron,
brass, and lead, or any metal under any shape it might lurk in. The
Auvergnat would give, for instance, a brown earthenware saucepan worth
two sous for a pound of lead, two pounds of iron, a broken spade or hoe
or a cracked kettle; and being invariably the judge of his own cause, he
did the weighing.

At the close of his third year Sauviat added the hawking of tin and
copper ware to that of his pottery. In 1793 he was able to buy a chateau
sold as part of the National domain, which he at once pulled to pieces.
The profits were such that he repeated the process at several points of
the sphere in which he operated; later, these first successful essays
gave him the idea of proposing something of a like nature on a larger
scale to one of his compatriots who lived in Paris. Thus it happened
that the "Bande Noire," so celebrated for its devastations, had its
birth in the brain of old Sauviat, the peddler, whom all Limoges
afterward saw and knew for twenty-seven years in the rickety old shop
among his cracked bells and rusty bars, chains and scales, his twisted
leaden gutters, and metal rubbish of all kinds. We must do him the
justice to say that he knew nothing of the celebrity or the extent
of the association he originated; he profited by his own idea only
in proportion to the capital he entrusted to the since famous firm of
Bresac.

Tired of