out in the squares and market-places, and there gossip
and do their knitting, as other women might at their firesides; but here
the sun is the only fire. But a good deal of the bustle this morning
was occasioned by the news from Paris that an attempt to assassinate
Napoleon III. had been made the day before; had we remained one day
longer in Paris we might have assisted at the spectacle. The Marseilles
people seemed to take it comfortably; nobody was very sorry that the
attempt had been made, nor very glad that it had not succeeded. It was
something to talk about. It was ten years more before the French got
thoroughly used to the nephew of his uncle and decided that he was, upon
the whole, a good thing; and soon after they lost him. And for a decade
after Sedan, chatting with the boulevardiers in Paris, they would
commonly tell me that they wished they had the empire back again.
Perhaps they will have it, some day.

There was a great deal of filth in Marseilles streets and along her
wharves and in the corners of her many public squares; and even our
hotel, the "Angleterre," was anything but clean; it was a tall, old
rookery, from the windows of our rooms in which I looked down into an
open space between the strange, old buildings, and saw a juggler do his
marvels on a bit of carpet spread on the pavement, while a woman handed
him the implements of magic out of a very much travelled and soiled
deal-box. Later in the day, when the place was deserted, I heedlessly
flung out of the window the contents of a glass of water, and, looking
after it in its long descent, I was horrified to see approaching a man
of very savage and piratical aspect, with a terrible black beard and a
slouch hat. As luck would have it, the water struck him full on the side
of the face, probably the first time in many a year that he had felt the
impact of the liquid there. I withdrew my head from the window in alarm,
mingled with the natural joy that a boy cannot help feeling at such a
catastrophe; and by-and-by, when I felt certain that he must have passed
on, I peeped out again, but what were my emotions at beholding him
planted terribly right under the window where he had been baptized, and
staring upward with a blood-thirsty expression. I immediately drew back
again, but too late--our eyes had met, and he had made a threatening
gesture at me. I now felt that a very serious thing had happened, and
that if I ventured out upon the streets again I shou