r talking
of me, hastily, as one who confides a choking secret, while Apolline
follows, with her arms swinging far from her body, limping and
outspread like a crab.

Says Mame, "That boy's bedroom is untidy. And then, too, he uses too
many shirt-collars, and he doesn't know how to blow his nose. He
stuffs handkerchiefs into his pockets, and you find them again like
stones."

"All the same, he's a good young man," stammers the waddling street
cleanser, brandishing her broom-bereaved hands at random, and shaking
over her swollen and many-storied boots a skirt weighted round the hem
by a coat-of-mail of dry mud.

These confidences with which Mame is in the habit of breaking forth
before no matter whom get on my nerves. I call her with some
impatience. She starts at the command, comes up, and throws me a
martyr's glance.

She proceeds with her nose lowered under her black hat with green
foliage, hurt that I should thus have summoned her before everybody,
and profoundly irritated. So a persevering malice awakens again in the
depths of her, and she mutters, very low, "You spat on the window the
other day!"

But she cannot resist hooking herself again on to another interlocutor,
whose Sunday trousers are planted on the causeway, like two posts, and
his blouse as stiff as a lump of iron ore. I leave them, and go alone
into Brisbille's.

The smithy hearth befires a workshop which bristles with black objects.
In the middle of the dark bodies of implements hanging from walls and
ceiling is the metallic Brisbille, with leaden hands, his dark apron
rainbowed with file-dust,--dirty on principle, because of his ideas,
this being Sunday. He is sober, and his face still unkindled, but he
is waiting impatiently for the church-going bell to begin, so that he
may go and drink, in complete solitude.

Through an open square, in the ponderous and dirt-shaggy glazing of the
smithy, one can see a portion of the street, and a sketch, in bright
and airy tones, of scattered people. It is like the sharply cut field
of vision in an opera-glass, in which figures are drawn and shaded, and
cross each other; where one makes out, at times, a hat bound and
befeathered, swaying as it goes; a little boy with sky-blue tie and
buttoned boots, and tubular knickers hanging round his thin, bare
calves; a couple of gossiping dames in swollen and somber petticoats,
who tack hither and thither, meet, are mutually attracted and dissolve
in convers