e were their enemies. We had now reached the crown
of the hill--the very heart of Belleville, and the last stronghold of
the Insurgents. It was crowded with soldiery: an hour in Belleville
under existing circumstances is enough to satisfy the morbid appetite
for excitement which may tempt people to go there. Notwithstanding the
crowds on the Boulevards, many of the shops are still shut, in
consequence of the absence of their owners from Paris. The difficulties
of entering and leaving the city are still so great that many days must
elapse before the ordinary population can return. Meantime, the want of
gas makes the streets as they were in the darkest moments of the siege,
and the gloom after dark, combined with the dangers of arrest, does not
tempt people to remain abroad much later than 10 o'clock.

Yesterday, out of one of the houses from which a shot had been fired, an
innocent Englishman, who, being elderly and deaf, knew nothing of what
had happened, came downstairs unsuspectingly on to the pavement into the
middle of the crowd, and had a very narrow escape for his life. Some
ingenious self-constituted detective called out "That's the man," and
the crowd, having long waited in vain for somebody, were only too glad
to have a victim thus extemporized to their hands, and if a few of the
cooler and more humane bystanders had not interfered, the Englishman
might have been murdered in cold blood and in broad daylight. As it was,
he got off with no more serious injury than torn clothes and a mauling
which may keep him to his bed for a fortnight.

What, to those who have witnessed the recent transformation scenes in
the great Parisian melodrama, is newest and strangest is the crowd of
well-dressed holyday-making loungers streaming so thickly over the
broad pavement that it is no easy matter to get through them, and
occupying every available chair outside the adjoining _cafe_. Where in
the world do they all come from? Many of them have stories of their
recent experiences to tell which, well arranged, might make the fortune
of a theatrical manager--stories so sensational that one would feel
bound to refuse them credence if they were not in perfect harmony with
the sensational scenes of which every third man's personal experience
has supplied him with a specimen. One man has been close prisoner in a
cellar two days and nights while fighting has been going on all around
him and over his head. Another has had to fly amid bullet