minable Grande Route du St.
Denis which drags its slow length along all the way to the famous Abbey
outside Paris.

The Rue du Faubourg St. Denis is a changed street now, and widens out,
prim, white, and glittering, towards the new barrier and the new Rond
Point. But in the dear old days of which I tell, it was the sloppiest,
worst-paved, worst-lighted, noisiest, narrowest, and most crowded of all
the great Paris thoroughfares north of the Seine. All the country
traffic from Chantilly and Compiegne came lumbering this way into the
city; diligences, omnibuses, wagons, fiacres, water-carts, and all kinds
of vehicles thronged and blocked the street perpetually; and the sound
of wheels ceased neither by night nor by day. The foot-pavements of the
Rue du Faubourg St. Denis, too, were always muddy, be the weather what
it might; and the gutters were always full of stagnant pools. An
ever-changing, never-failing stream of rustics from the country,
workpeople from the factories of the _banlieu,_ grisettes, commercial
travellers, porters, commissionaires, and _gamins_ of all ages here
flowed to and fro. Itinerant venders of cakes, lemonade, cocoa,
chickweed, _allumettes_, pincushions, six-bladed penknives, and
never-pointed pencils filled the air with their cries, and made both day
and night hideous. You could not walk a dozen yards at any time without
falling down a yawning cellar-trap, or being run over by a porter with a
huge load upon his head, or getting splashed from head to foot by the
sudden pulling-up of some cart in the gutter beside you.

It was among the peculiarities of the Rue du Faubourg St. Denis that
everybody was always in a hurry, and that nobody was ever seen to look
in at the shop-windows. The shops, indeed, might as well have had no
windows, since there were no loungers to profit by them. Every house,
nevertheless, was a shop, and every shop had its window. These windows,
however, were for the most part of that kind before which the passer-by
rarely cares to linger; for the commerce of the Rue du Faubourg St.
Denis was of that steady, unpretending, money-making sort that despises
mere shop-front attractions. Grocers, stationers, corn-chandlers,
printers, cutlers, leather-sellers, and such other inelegant trades,
here most did congregate; and to the wearied wayfarer toiling along the
dead level of this dreary pave, it was quite a relief to come upon even
an artistically-arranged _Magasin de Charcuterie_, wit