d a certain rascally gleam
which had appeared in them when he was so _empresse_ with the offer of
his services. The face was better then--that is, if vice is better than
ignorance. We say a countenance is 'lit up' by a smile; and indeed that
momentary flicker does the office of a candle in a dark room. It sheds a
ray upon the dim upholstery of our souls. The visages of poor men,
generally, know few alternations. There is a large class of human beings
whom fortune restricts to a single change of expression, or, perhaps,
rather to a single expression. Ah me! the faces which wear either
nakedness or rags; whose repose is stagnation, whose activity vice;
ingorant at their worst, infamous at their best!

'Don't pull too hard,' said Hortense at last. 'Hadn't you better take
breath a moment?'

'Madame is very good,' said the man, leaning upon his oars. 'But if you
had taken me by the hour,' he added, with a return of the vicious grin,
'you wouldn't catch me loitering.'

'I suppose you work very hard,' said Madame Bernier.

The man gave a little toss of his head, as if to intimate the inadequacy
of any supposition to grasp the extent of his labors.

'I've been up since four o'clock this morning, wheeling bales and boxes
on the quay, and plying my little boat. Sweating without five minutes'
intermission. _C'est comme ca_. Sometimes I tell my mate I think I'll
take a plunge in the basin to dry myself. Ha! ha! ha!'

'And of course you gain little,' said Madame Bernier.

'Worse than nothing. Just what will keep me fat enough for starvation to
feed on.'

'How? you go without your necessary food?'

'Necessary is a very elastic word, madame. You can narrow it down, so
that in the degree above nothing it means luxury. My necessary food is
sometimes thin air. If I don't deprive myself of that, it's because I
can't.'

'Is it possible to be so unfortunate?'

'Shall I tell you what I have eaten to-day?'

'Do,' said Madame Bernier.

'A piece of black bread and a salt herring are all that have passed my
lips for twelve hours.'

'Why don't you get some better work?'

'If I should die to-night,' pursued the boatman, heedless of the
question, in the manner of a man whose impetus on the track of self-pity
drives him past the signal flags of relief, 'what would there be left to
bury me? These clothes I have on might buy me a long box. For the cost
of this shabby old suit, that hasn't lasted me a twelve-month, I could
get one t