They are ubiquitous, and all alike. Their being all alike is what makes them ubiquitous. You see him on the boulevards--you dive down from those dizzy heights of splendor, from the broad glare of that magnificence, to the poverty-made twilight of the Latin quarter, or the Cimmerian gloom of the Faubourg St. Antoine, and you see him. Just the same. He wears the same reminiscence of a hat, the same remnants of trowsers, the same shirt with holes torn in it in the same places, the flag of distress floats from the same quarter, if, indeed, the shirt is long enough to boast a lower end, and the bare feet in the summer, and the dilapidated shoes in the winter, are the same. It is not the same boy, but it is the boy cast in the same mold, and with all the others, subject to the same conditions, and consequently exactly like as peas. Nature makes men in molds. Noblemen's sons have something in their make-up besides their clothes, and so have the children of poverty. A pallet in a garret, or, more usually, the bare floor; a crust, or the core of an apple at rare and uncertain intervals, are as certain to produce one typical face and a typical body as luxurious beds and rich food do another. [Sidenote: WHAT BECOMES OF THE GAMIN.] The Parisian gamins are alike wherever you see them, for they all come from one stock, and are all brought up in one way. So nearly are they alike that the old saying might well be reversed. Instead of its being "It's a wise child that knows its own father," it should read "It's a wise mother that knows her own child." With these waifs, a child's knowing, or even guessing, at its own father, would be an idea utterly chimerical. Yet they are good-natured, and even kind to each other. There are girl vagabonds and girl waifs as well as boy waifs. The boys are wonderfully good to the little homeless girls who are too Arab-like to go to the retreats provided for them by the Government. If the boy has a warm place under a bridge or over a lime kiln, he gives it up to the wandering female rat, with as much chivalry as any grand Seigneur could display, and he shares with her the result of his predatory excursions, even going a trifle more hungry himself that she may not entirely starve. They are always hungry--it is only a question of how hungry they may be.