Somehow she managed to make the little den they existed in rather pleasant, and he had a tolerably happy life. Only the mother was compelled to leave him very much alone, for there was the black bread to earn, and no matter how miserable their apartment, there was something to pay for rent. He was left, always, with a score of others just like him, with an old woman who had once gone through the same experience, and who, unable now to do other work, earned her few sous a day caring for children that were short a father, and whose mothers were skirmishing on the outside borders of existence for enough to keep body and soul together. This was all very well till the little legs were strong enough to walk, and the old woman could no longer control him. Armed with the [Illustration: THE AGED PICKER-UP OF CIGAR STUMPS.] [Sidenote: THE GAMIN AND HIS MOTHER.] preternatural sharpness that always accompanies poverty, he took to the streets, and, in the old times when begging was permitted, he was a beggar. Now he is anything. He scorns regular work, he is a hawk, who picks up his living here, there and everywhere. He may be on the boulevards, and a handkerchief may be dropped; the apple-women, sharp as they are, find in him a most competent brigand. There are cigar-stumps to be picked up, and they are worth something an ounce to be worked over into smoking tobacco. Everywhere in the great city there are unconsidered trifles, but an unconsidered trifle is everything to a boy who has no use for clothing, and to whom a crust of bread is enough for a day. Finally, at the mature age of eight, or thereabouts, he leaves his mother; or, rather, some night he does not come home. He has found a dry place under an arch to sleep, or a hole in the docks, and he has associated with him other boys of the same breed; now he is an independent citizen. His mother knows the way of the world, and she goes right on, sure that her child is living, and, in his way, well. He occasionally goes to see her, till she moves some time suddenly, and is lost to him in the great desert. He probably never sees her again. If she gets on well and keeps her health she dies finally in a hospital--if not, a plunge in the Seine ends her struggles with a very hard world. Not infrequently his last look at her is taken in the Morgue. While he is a boy he leads a very independent and happy life. He toils not, neither does he spin; he does not dine at the Maison Doree; nor does he drink champagne or burgundy. He drinks wine when he can get it, and water from the public fountain when he cannot. He eats black bread when he has a sou to buy it with; lacking the sou, there are always opportunities to steal an apple, and failing in that, there are apple cores to be picked up on the streets.