“Eh, my little radishes!” she cried in a voice like a corncrake’s. “Advance, you! Come, then--come! Here is a cat shall strip you of your breeches if you venture within her reach.” Ned felt, and the crowd looked, astonishment over this unexpected championship. In the momentary proximate silence that befell, the shattering explosion of many of M. Reveillon’s windows bursting under volleys of stones was a significantly acute accent. The fishwife nodded her head a great number of times. “_Hé_! my little rats, you will not come? That is well for your whiskers, indeed. And do we _not_ demand liberty of speech, as monsieur says; and are we not taking it to denounce one that would deprive us of the liberty to live? How! You would raise the devil against monsieur?” (she waxed furious in an instant)--“Monsieur l’Anglais, that all the hard winter has lived like a Jacobin friar, that he might give of his substance to the cold and the starving? Monsieur l’Anglais that lodges at the fruiterer’s, and without whose help Fanchon and her brat had been rotting now in St Pélagie! Oh, _san’ Dieu_! I know--I know! Pigs, beasts, ingrates! It will be well, in truth, for the first that comes within my reach!” A rolling laugh, that swelled to a roar, took up the very echo of madame’s surprising tirade. “_Vive l’Anglais_! the friend of the poor, the apostle of liberty!” shrieked twenty voices. Too amazed by this sudden rightabout of a national weathercock to protest against its misrepresentation of the direction of his own little breeze of righteousness, Ned made no resistance, when all in a moment he felt himself tossed up on billowing shoulders, and conveyed helplessly from the thick centre of operations. The clamour of hairy throats, exhaling winey fustian about him, staggered his brain. He had not even that self-possession left him to blush to find his stealthy goodness famous. And when the escort landed him at Madame Gamelle’s door, and with hurried _vivats_ testified to his immediate popularity, he could think of no more appropriate remark to make to them than, “I protest, messieurs, that I have never travelled so high in others’, or so low in my own opinion, before”; which, inasmuch as it was fortunately spoken in English, and accompanied by a profoundly ironical bow, served the occasion as gracefully as much compliment would have done.