But to return to our theme, the cries of the marchands. It would take a pen like Balzac's, as curiously versatile, as observant, as full of individual ink, to catch all the shades of these odd utterances. You may recollect as you lay in your sweet English bed in London, just as the fog was lifting over the great city early in the morning, the distinct individuality of the voices which, although you did not see their owners, told each its story of sunrise thrift and industry as it cried to you the early peas or the wood or the melons of the season. You may remember, too, how perplexing, how fantastic, many of those cries were, making it impossible for you to understand what they meant, or why a wood-huckster, for example, should give vent to such lachrymose sentimentality in vending his fagots. But quite different is the Paris marchand. With a physiognomy of voice--if the expression be pardoned--quite as marked as the cockney's, what he says is yet perfectly clear, often shrewd, gay, cynical, sometimes even spiced with jocularity, as if it were pure fun to get a living, and the world were all a holiday. Some years ago a marchand was in the habit of visiting our neighborhood whose specialty it was to vend _baguettes_, or small rods for beating carpets, tapestry and padded furniture. His cry was--"Voila des baguettes! Battez vos meubles, battez vos tapis, battez vos _femmes_ pour UN sou!" It is said that as this gay chiffonnier went one morning by the fish-markets uttering this jocose cry, a squad of those formidable _poissardes_, the fishwomen of Paris, got after him, and administered a sound thrashing with his own baguettes. Such is the vengeance of the French-woman! But there is a curious pathos in many of these cries--queer searching tones which go to the heart and set one thinking; tones that come again in times of revolution, and gather into the terrible roar of the Commune. I sometimes wonder if they ever sell anything, those strange sad voices of the early morning struggling up from the street. They are the voices of Humanity on its mighty errand of bread and meat. Some dozen or so traverse our quarter through the day--some of feeble old women, full of sharp complaint; some of strong, quick-stepping men; some of little children with faint modest voices, as if unused to the cruel work of getting a living. It is these poor people who walk from Montmartre to Passy in the morning, and in the evening fish for drowned dogs or pick up corks along the canal of the Porte St. Martin. For a dog it is said they get a franc or two, and corks go at a few sous a hundred.