been
all over France, and nowhere, nowhere, "not even on the borders of
Germany," had he met with such misconduct. Such thieves and rogues and
rascals, as he called them! And every now and again the wife issued on
another round, and added her shrill quota to the tirade. I remarked
here, as elsewhere, how far more copious is the female mind in the
material of insult. The audience laughed in high good-humour over the
man's declamations, but they bridled and cried aloud under the woman's
pungent sallies. She picked out the sore points. She had the honour of
the village at her mercy. Voices answered her angrily out of the crowd,
and received a smarting retort for their trouble. A couple of old ladies
beside me, who had duly paid for their seats, waxed very red and
indignant, and discoursed to each other audibly about the impudence of
these mountebanks; but as soon as the show-woman caught a whisper of
this, she was down upon them with a swoop: if mesdames could persuade
their neighbours to act with common honesty, the mountebanks, she
assured them, would be polite enough: mesdames had probably had their
bowl of soup, and perhaps a glass of wine that evening; the mountebanks
also had a taste for soup, and did not choose to have their little
earnings stolen from them before their eyes. Once, things came as far as
a brief personal encounter between the showman and some lads, in which
the former went down as readily as one of his own marionnettes to a peal
of jeering laughter.

I was a good deal astonished at this scene, because I am pretty well
acquainted with the ways of French strollers, more or less artistic; and
have always found them singularly pleasing. Any stroller must be dear to
the right-thinking heart; if it were only as a living protest against
offices and the mercantile spirit, and as something to remind us that
life is not by necessity the kind of thing we generally make it. Even a
German band, if you see it leaving town in the early morning for a
campaign in country places, among trees and meadows, has a romantic
flavour for the imagination. There is nobody, under thirty, so dead but
his heart will stir a little at sight of a gypsies' camp. "We are not
cotton-spinners all"--or, at least, not all through. There is some life
in humanity yet: and youth will now and again find a brave word to say
in dispraise of riches, and throw up a situation to go strolling with a
knapsack.

An Englishman has always special fa