serted, while Madame
hastened across the street in her clattering sabots to warn her friend.

The bustle of the market is soon ended. By ten o'clock the piles of
vegetables are sensibly diminished. By half-past ten the white-capped
maid-servants have carried the heavy baskets home, and are busy
preparing lunch. At eleven o'clock the sharp boy whose stock-in-trade
consisted of three trays of snails stuffed _a la_ Bourgogne has sold all
the large ones at 45 centimes a dozen, all the small at 25, and quite
two-thirds of the medium-sized at 35 centimes.

The clock points to eleven. The sun is high now. The vendors awaken to
the consciousness of hunger, and Madame of the _pommes frites_ stall,
whose assistant dexterously cuts the peeled tubers into strips, is fully
occupied in draining the crisp golden shreds from the boiling fat and
handing them over, well sprinkled with salt and pepper, to avid
customers, who devour them smoking hot, direct from their paper
cornucopias.

Long before the first gloom of the early mid-winter dusk, all has been
cleared away. The rickety stalls have been demolished; the unsold
remainder of the goods disposed of; the worthy country folks, their
pockets heavy with _sous_, are well on their journey homewards, and only
a litter of straw, of cabbage leaves and leek tops remains as evidence
of the lively market of the morning.

[Illustration: Chestnuts in the Avenue]

CHAPTER IV

OUR ARBRE DE NOEL

We bought it on the Sunday morning from old Grand'mere Gomard in the
Avenue de St. Cloud.

It was not a noble specimen of a Christmas-tree. Looked at with cold,
unimaginative eyes, it might have been considered lopsided; undersized
it undoubtedly was. Yet a pathetic familiarity in the desolate aspect of
the little tree aroused our sympathy as no rare horticultural trophy
ever could.

Some Christmas fairy must have whispered to Grand'mere to grub up the
tiny tree and to include it in the stock she was taking into Versailles
on the market morning. For there it was, its roots stuck securely into a
big pot, looking like some forlorn forest bantling among the garden
plants.

[Illustration: The Tree Vendor]

Grand'mere Gomard had established herself in a cosy nook at the foot of
one of the great leafless trees of the Avenue. Straw hurdles were
cunningly arranged to form three sides of a square, in whose midst she
was seated on a rush-bottomed chair, like a queen on a humble throne.
Her he