didn't count, my lad! The others didn't even know what they'd come for. And the bosses; they'd had a fright, and they didn't half wriggle and roar with laughing--I'll vouch for it, my lad! An' then, to-morrow, if they want to start again, there'll be troops here!" Joyful astonishment--the strike had been drowned in wine! And we repeated to each other, "To-morrow there'll be the military!" "Ah!" gaped Crillon, rolling wonder-struck eyes, "That's clever! Good; that's clever, that is! Good, old chap----" He laughed a heavy, vengeful laugh, and repeated his familiar refrain full-throated: "The sovereign people that can't stand on its own legs!" By the side of a few faint-hearted citizens who had already, since the morning, modified their political opinions, a great figure rises before my eyes--Fontan. I remember that night, already long ago, when a chance glimpse through the vent-hole of his cellar showed me shiploads of bottles of champagne heaped together, and pointed like shells. For some future day he foresaw to-day's victory. He is really clever, he sees clearly and he sees far. He has rescued law and order by a sort of genius. The constraint which has weighed all day on our gestures and words explodes in delight. Noisily we cast off that demeanor of conspirators which has bent our shoulders since morning. The windows that were closed during the weighty hours of the insurrection are opened wide; the houses breathe again. "We're saved from that gang!" people say, when they approach each other. This feeling of deliverance pervades the most lowly. On the step of the little blood-red restaurant I spy Monsieur Mielvaque, hopping for joy. He is shivering, too, in his thin gray coat, cracked with wrinkles, that looks like wrapping paper; and one would say that his dwindled face had at long last caught the hue of the folios he desperately copies among his long days and his short nights, to pick up some sprigs of extra pay. There he stands, not daring to enter the restaurant (for a reason he knows too well); but how delighted he is with the day's triumph for society! And Mademoiselle Constantine, the dressmaker, incurably poor and worn away by her sewing-machine, is overjoyed. She opens wide the eyes which seem eternally full of tears, and in the grayish abiding half-mourning of imperfect cleanliness, in pallid excitement, she claps her hands. Marie and I can hear the furious desperate hammering of Brisbille in his forge, and we begin to laugh as we have not laughed for a long time.