larated urchins poking at poor meek
Adrienne in a manner the most _mechant_. And so on they went till the
peasant and his invaluable assistant were quite out of hearing.

There is no end to the originality of the Parisians. If you but go to a
kiosque to get a _Figaro_, the white-capped marchande has something
clever to say. The rain, the air, the clouds, the sun are full of
_esprit_ for her--are to her banques de France, upon which she has an
unlimited credit--_credit fonder_, if you will, _credit mobilier_, or
what not. The _conducteur_ who stands behind his omnibus and obligingly
helps you in, says _Merci_! with an accent so exquisite that it is like
wit or poetry or music, utterly throwing you into despair after your
months and months of travail and dozens and dozens of louis lavished on
incompetent professors.

"Pronounce that for me, please," said I one day to a gentleman who had
just spoken some word whose secret of pronunciation I had been trying to
filch for weeks--some delicate little jewel of a word, faint as a
perfume, expressive as only a tiny Parisian word can be--and he did so
in the politest manner in the world, adding some little witticism which
I do not recall. Whereupon I went home and instantly dismissed my
"professor."

But to return to our theme, the cries of the marchands. It would take a
pen like Balzac's, as curiously versatile, as observant, as full of
individual ink, to catch all the shades of these odd utterances. You may
recollect as you lay in your sweet English bed in London, just as the
fog was lifting over the great city early in the morning, the distinct
individuality of the voices which, although you did not see their
owners, told each its story of sunrise thrift and industry as it cried
to you the early peas or the wood or the melons of the season. You may
remember, too, how perplexing, how fantastic, many of those cries were,
making it impossible for you to understand what they meant, or why a
wood-huckster, for example, should give vent to such lachrymose
sentimentality in vending his fagots. But quite different is the Paris
marchand. With a physiognomy of voice--if the expression be
pardoned--quite as marked as the cockney's, what he says is yet
perfectly clear, often shrewd, gay, cynical, sometimes even spiced with
jocularity, as if it were pure fun to get a living, and the world were
all a holiday.

Some years ago a marchand was in the habit of visiting our neighborhood
whose