y even of a blouse. They wear a coat
sometimes, but it is a marvel of a coat, and was in the last stages of
tottering old age before it fell to the blousard. They wear leather
boots too sometimes, instead of the wooden shoes belonging to their
station, but they are boots which are but a mockery and a delusion,
and yield the wearer no comfort. A respectable blousard--a carpenter
or a shoemaker or a member of any honest trade--would scorn to be seen
in any other dress but his neat blouse, unless on some great day, a
fete, his wedding or at church, when he wears his only coat, or his
father's or a friend's. The blouse is in its sphere a badge of
respectability to the wearer, and honest blousards look upon the
assumption of a blouse by a thief as a gross imposition upon the
public at large and an outrage upon honest workingmen. There is a wide
range of quality in blouses, too. I bought one in the Rue Mouffetard,
to wear as a protection in some of my night-wanderings, for the sum of
forty cents: it was a plain frock of coarse stuff, with a string at
the neck. But there were blouses of several degrees of fineness in the
shop--some of very fine linen, tied with a white silk ribbon, and
neatly embroidered. The usual color of blouses is white, blue or
black. The material is often a coarse, warm cloth, such as one might
make a very respectable overcoat of, I should think. In cold weather
it is common to see men wearing two or even three blouses, one over
the other. Caps are sold at from twenty to sixty cents each in the
same street. It will be seen that clothing is inexpensive to the
blousard, and as the fashions _never_ change with him, he never lays
aside a garment till it is quite worn out.

One of the peculiar features of low Paris is the shop for the sale of
articles at the uniform price of one son. One before which I paused
in the Rue Mouffetard was presided over, by two women--evidently
grandmother and granddaughter. The former was as grotesque a type of
the jolly old _vendeuse_ of Paris as it would be possible to find. A
low, winey humor twinkled in her little black eyes, hidden in wrinkly
wads of fat; her nose glowed with good feeling; her toothless mouth
smirked good-naturedly. A worn shawl covered her chunky shoulders, and
a cap like a muslin and flannel extinguisher protected her bald old
head from the weather. The granddaughter, being young and rather
pretty, was less interesting as a picture of a curious type. The s