families exiled from the suburbs, or in
supplement to the hospitals. The amount of relief they afforded
unostentatiously, out of means that shared the general failure of
accustomed resource, when the famine commenced, would be scarcely
credible if stated. Admirable, too, were the fortitude and resignation
of the genuine Parisian bourgeoisie,--the thrifty tradesfolk and small
rentiers,--that class in which, to judge of its timidity when opposed
to a mob, courage is not the most conspicuous virtue. Courage became so
now--courage to bear hourly increasing privation, and to suppress every
murmur of suffering that would discredit their patriotism, and invoke
"peace at any price." It was on this class that the calamities of the
siege now pressed the most heavily. The stagnation of trade, and the
stoppage of the rents, in which they had invested their savings, reduced
many of them to actual want. Those only of their number who obtained the
pay of one-and-a-half franc a day as National Guards, could be sure to
escape from starvation. But this pay had already begun to demoralise the
receivers. Scanty for supply of food, it was ample for supply of drink.
And drunkenness, hitherto rare in that rank of the Parisians, became
a prevalent vice, aggravated in the case of a National Guard, when
it wholly unfitted him for the duties he undertook, especially such
National Guards as were raised from the most turbulent democracy of the
working class.

But of all that population; there were two sections in which the
most beautiful elements of our human nature were most touchingly
manifest--the women and the priesthood, including in the latter
denomination all the various brotherhoods and societies which religion
formed and inspired.

It was on the 27th of December that Frederic Lemercier stood gazing
wistfully on a military report affixed to a blank wall, which stated
that "the enemy, worn out by a resistance of over one hundred days,"
had commenced the bombardment. Poor Frederic was sadly altered; he had
escaped the Prussian's guns, but not the Parisian winter--the severest
known for twenty years. He was one of the many frozen at their
posts--brought back to the ambulance with Fox in his bosom trying
to keep him warm. He had only lately been sent forth as
convalescent,--ambulances were too crowded to retain a patient longer
than absolutely needful,--and had been hunger-pinched and frost-pinched
ever since. The luxurious Frederic had stil