d and
imperfectly swaddled in a tattered shawl, on a flaccid bosom, the mob
were silent in an expectation as intense as the lookers-on. The wind
brought the whistle of the railway locomotives and the clanking of a
steam-dredger in the river, like a giant toiling in massive chains.

For this platoon of vice and misery, crime and disorder, laziness and
rapine, the stranger confidently expected to see a commander appear
whose flashing, fearless eye, and upright, powerful frame, would account
for the awe in which all were held.

What was his amazement, therefore, to perceive--while a tremor of
emotion thrilled the line and announced the commander whom all
awaited--a bent-up, scarcely human-shaped form, hardly to be
acknowledged a woman's. It was enveloped in a heavily furred pelisse
fitted for a man.

This singular object appeared up the trap of a cellarway, much like the
opening of a sewer, on the opposite side of the street. She proceeded to
review the vagabonds and put questions and issue orders to each, which
were received like mandates from Caesar by his legions. The voice was
fine and shrill, the movements betokened vigor, but the whole impression
was that the female captain-general of the beggars of Munich was far
from young.

In the obscurity, and keeping in the background as he did, it was not
possible for the stranger to scan her features; besides, they were
veiled by the long hair of a Polish hunter's cap, with earflaps and a
drooping foxtail, worn as the pompon but half-loosened in time. The
eyes that inspected the file of vagrants, shone with undiminished force,
and when they fell on the burliest and most impudent, these became quiet
and submissive. In a word, the cohort of beggary yielded utter
subserviency to this remarkable leader.

Questions and answers were uttered in a thieve's jargon which were
sealed letters to the eavesdropper, but it seemed to him that they all
addressed her as _Baboushka_! This struck him as more odd from its being
a Slavonic title, meaning "grandmother." Was it possible that he had
before him one of those prolific centenarians, truly a mother of the
tribe, a gypsy queen to whom allegiance went undisputed and who rules
the subterranean strata of society with fewer revolts against them than
their sister rulers know, who sit on thrones in the fierce white light?

In any case, he was given no leisure for deciding the question, for an
active urchin had whispered a word of caution