The Parisian gamin almost forms a caste, and we might say that a boy does not become so by wishing. The word _gamin_ was printed for the first time, and passed from the populace into literature, in 1834. It made its first appearance in a work called "Claude Gueux." The scandal was great, but the word has remained. The elements that constitute the consideration of gamins among one another are very varied. We knew and petted one, who was greatly respected and admired because he had seen a man fall off the towers of Notre Dame; another, because he had managed to enter the back-yard in which the statues of the dome of the Invalides were temporarily deposited, and steal lead off them; another, because he had seen a diligence upset; another, because he knew a soldier who had all but put out the eye of a civilian. This explains the exclamation of the Parisian gamin, at which the vulgar laughed without understanding its depth: "Dieu de Dieu! how unlucky I am! Just think that I never saw anybody fall from a fifth floor!" Assuredly it was a neat remark of the peasant's: "Father So-and-so, your wife has died of her illness: why did you not send for a doctor?"-- "What would you have, sir? We poor people die of ourselves." But if all the passiveness of the peasant is contained in this remark, all the free-thinking anarchy of the faubourien will be found in the following: A man condemned to death is listening to the confessor in the cart, and the child of Paris protests,--"He is talking to the skull-cap. Oh, the capon!"