d to me that these toilers were different sorts of
beings from the detached and impecunious people who live around me.
When I look at this one I say to myself, "They are the same; they are
all alike."

In the distance, and together, they strike fear, and their combination
is a menace; but near by they are only the same as this one. One must
not look at them in the distance.

Petrolus gets excited; he makes gestures; he punches in and punches out
again with his fist, the hat which is stuck askew on his conical head,
over the ears that are pointed like artichoke leaves. He is in front
of me, and each of his soles is pierced by a valve which draws in water
from the saturated ground.

"The unions, monsieur----" he cries to me in the wind, "why, it's
dangerous to point at them. You haven't the right to think any
more--that's what they call liberty. If you're in _them_, you've got
to be agin the parsons--(I'm willing, but what's that got to do with
labor?)--and there's something more serious," the lamp-man adds, in a
suddenly changed voice, "you've got to be agin the army,--the _army_!"

And now the poor slave of the lamp seems to take a resolution. He
stops and devotionally rolling his Don Quixote eyes in his gloomy,
emaciated face, he says, "_I'm_ always thinking about something. What?
you'll say. Well, here it is. I belong to the League of Patriots."

As they brighten still more, his eyes are like two live embers in the
darkness, "Deroulede!" he cries; "that's the man--he's _my_ God!"

Petrolus raises his voice and gesticulates; he makes great movements in
the night at the vision of his idol, to whom his leanness and his long
elastic arms give him some resemblance. "He's for war; he's for
Alsace-Lorraine, that's what he's for; and above all, he's for nothing
else. Ah, that's all there is to it! The Boches have got to disappear
off the earth, else it'll be us. Ah, when they talk politics to _me_,
I ask 'em, 'Are you for Deroulede, yes or no?' That's enough! I got
my schooling any old how, and I know next to nothing but I reckon it's
grand, only to think like that, and in the Reserves I'm
adjutant[1]--almost an officer, monsieur, just a lamp-man as I am!"

[Footnote 1: A non-com., approximately equivalent to regimental
sergeant-major.--Tr.]

He tells me, almost in shouts and signs, because of the wind across the
open, that his worship dates from a function at which Paul Deroulede
had spoken to him. "H