ch could be read:
Invenerunt parvulum pannis involutum, some mountebank's booth from which
they had fled; perhaps they had, on the preceding evening, escaped the
eye of the inspectors of the garden at the hour of closing, and had
passed the night in some one of those sentry-boxes where people read the
papers? The fact is, they were stray lambs and they seemed free. To be
astray and to seem free is to be lost. These poor little creatures were,
in fact, lost.

These two children were the same over whom Gavroche had been put to
some trouble, as the reader will recollect. Children of the Thenardiers,
leased out to Magnon, attributed to M. Gillenormand, and now leaves
fallen from all these rootless branches, and swept over the ground by
the wind. Their clothing, which had been clean in Magnon's day, and
which had served her as a prospectus with M. Gillenormand, had been
converted into rags.

Henceforth these beings belonged to the statistics as "Abandoned
children," whom the police take note of, collect, mislay and find again
on the pavements of Paris.

It required the disturbance of a day like that to account for these
miserable little creatures being in that garden. If the superintendents
had caught sight of them, they would have driven such rags forth. Poor
little things do not enter public gardens; still, people should reflect
that, as children, they have a right to flowers.

These children were there, thanks to the locked gates. They were there
contrary to the regulations. They had slipped into the garden and there
they remained. Closed gates do not dismiss the inspectors, oversight
is supposed to continue, but it grows slack and reposes; and the
inspectors, moved by the public anxiety and more occupied with the
outside than the inside, no longer glanced into the garden, and had not
seen the two delinquents.

It had rained the night before, and even a little in the morning. But
in June, showers do not count for much. An hour after a storm, it can
hardly be seen that the beautiful blonde day has wept. The earth, in
summer, is as quickly dried as the cheek of a child. At that period of
the solstice, the light of full noonday is, so to speak, poignant. It
takes everything. It applies itself to the earth, and superposes itself
with a sort of suction. One would say that the sun was thirsty. A shower
is but a glass of water; a rainstorm is instantly drunk up. In the
morning everything was dripping, in the afternoon ever