occasionally where a drinking or an eating house had its swing-doors
still invitingly open. From these places, as de Batz strode rapidly by,
came sounds of loud voices, rendered raucous by outdoor oratory; volleys
of oaths hurled irreverently in the midst of impassioned speeches;
interruptions from rowdy audiences that vied with the speaker in
invectives and blasphemies; wordy war-fares that ended in noisy
vituperations; accusations hurled through the air heavy with tobacco
smoke and the fumes of cheap wines and of raw spirits.

De Batz took no heed of these as he passed, anxious only that the crowd
of eating-house politicians did not, as often was its wont, turn out
pele-mele into the street, and settle its quarrel by the weight
of fists. He did not wish to be embroiled in a street fight, which
invariably ended in denunciations and arrests, and was glad when
presently he had left the purlieus of the Palais Royal behind him, and
could strike on his left toward the lonely Faubourg du Temple.

From the dim distance far away came at intervals the mournful sound of a
roll of muffled drums, half veiled by the intervening hubbub of the
busy night life of the great city. It proceeded from the Place de la
Revolution, where a company of the National Guard were on night watch
round the guillotine. The dull, intermittent notes of the drum came as
a reminder to the free people of France that the watchdog of a vengeful
revolution was alert night and day, never sleeping, ever wakeful,
"beating up game for the guillotine," as the new decree framed to-day by
the Government of the people had ordered that it should do.

From time to time now the silence of this lonely street was broken by
a sudden cry of terror, followed by the clash of arms, the inevitable
volley of oaths, the call for help, the final moan of anguish. They
were the ever-recurring brief tragedies which told of denunciations, of
domiciliary search, of sudden arrests, of an agonising desire for
life and for freedom--for life under these same horrible conditions of
brutality and of servitude, for freedom to breathe, if only a day or two
longer, this air, polluted by filth and by blood.

De Batz, hardened to these scenes, paid no heed to them. He had heard it
so often, that cry in the night, followed by death-like silence; it
came from comfortable bourgeois houses, from squalid lodgings, or
lonely cul-de-sac, wherever some hunted quarry was run to earth by the
newly-organ