Porter. He had been cramming for a
fortnight past, in order to emerge triumphantly from the examination to
which candidates were always subjected, and that very morning he had sat
in the Hotel de Ville wrestling with nothing less than a problem in
arithmetic. In proof, he produced from his pocket a crumpled, greasy and
wine-stained sheet of paper scrawled all over with childish writing and
figures, and showed it to his sister, immensely proud of the effect he
was producing on her. "A problem," he repeated. "See here: two taps fill
a tank at the rate of twenty litres a minute, and a third tap empties it
at the rate of fifteen hundred litres an hour. How long will it take for
the tank to get full?"

A friend of Geoffroy's broke in: it was Mealy Benoit, his most
formidable competitor for the appointment.

"And how long will it take for you to get full?" he asked with a great
laugh.

Hogshead Geoffroy banged his fist on the table.

"This is a serious conversation," he said, and turned again to his
sister, who wanted to know if he had succeeded in finding the answer to
the problem. "Maybe," he replied. "I worked by rule of thumb, for, as
you know, arithmetic and all those devil's funniments aren't in my line.
To sit for an hour, writing at a table in the great hall of the Hotel de
Ville--not much! It made me sweat more than carrying four
hundredweight!"

But the company was preparing to make a move. Time was getting on, and
at six o'clock the second part of the examination, the physical test,
was to be held in the Fish Market. Mealy Benoit had paid his score
already, and Hogshead Geoffroy's deferent escort of friends was getting
restless. Berthe won fresh favour in her brother's eyes by paying for
their refreshments with a ten franc piece and leaving the change to be
placed to his credit, and then with him she left the wineshop.

* * * * *

The annual competition for an appointment as Market Porter is held at
the end of September. It is a great event. There are generally many
candidates, but only two or three, and sometimes less, of the best are
picked. The posts are few and good, for the number of porters is
limited. The examination is in two parts: one purely intellectual,
consisting of some simple problem and a little dictation, the other
physical, in which the candidates have to carry a sack of meal weighing
three hundredweight a distance of two hundred yards in the shortest
time.