Now they are vanishing
points in that new underground world--that wonder of the present
day--the sewers of Paris. The Dryad was there, and not in the
world's Exhibition in the Champ de Mars.

She heard exclamations of wonder and admiration.

"From here go forth health and life for thousands upon thousands
up yonder! Our time is the time of progress, with its manifold
blessings."

Such was the opinion and the speech of men; but not of those
creatures who had been born here, and who built and dwelt here--of the
rats, namely, who were squeaking to one another in the clefts of a
crumbling wall, quite plainly, and in a way the Dryad understood well.

A big old Father-Rat, with his tail bitten off, was relieving
his feelings in loud squeaks; and his family gave their tribute of
concurrence to every word he said:

"I am disgusted with this man-mewing," he cried--"with these
outbursts of ignorance. A fine magnificence, truly! all made up of gas
and petroleum! I can't eat such stuff as that. Everything here is so
fine and bright now, that one's ashamed of one's self, without exactly
knowing why. Ah, if we only lived in the days of tallow candles! and
it does not lie so very far behind us. That was a romantic time, as
one may say."

"What are you talking of there?" asked the Dryad. "I have never
seen you before. What is it you are talking about?"

"Of the glorious days that are gone," said the Rat--"of the
happy time of our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers. Then it
was a great thing to get down here. That was a rat's nest quite
different from Paris. Mother Plague used to live here then; she killed
people, but never rats. Robbers and smugglers could breathe freely
here. Here was the meeting-place of the most interesting personages,
whom one now only gets to see in the theatres where they act
melodrama, up above. The time of romance is gone even in our rat's
nest; and here also fresh air and petroleum have broken in."

Thus squeaked the Rat; he squeaked in honor of the old time,
when Mother Plague was still alive.

A carriage stopped, a kind of open omnibus, drawn by swift horses.
The company mounted and drove away along the Boulevard de
Sebastopol, that is to say, the underground boulevard, over which
the well-known crowded street of that name extended.

The carriage disappeared in the twilight; the Dryad disappeared,
lifted to the cheerful freshness above. Here, and not below in the
vaulted passages, fille