grandson better educated than himself, and he had a great respect for
printer's ink. In his new trade the boy found his work more exhausting
than in the old: but he felt more free to think among the throng of
workers than in the little shop where he used to sit alone with his
grandfather.

The best time of day was the dinner hour. He would escape and get right
away from the horde of artisans crowding round the little tables on the
pavement and into the wineshops of the district, and limp along to the
square hard by: and there he would sit astride a bench under a spreading
chestnut-tree, near a bronze dancing faun with grapes in his hands, and
untie his brown-paper parcel of bread and meat, and munch it slowly,
surrounded by a little crowd of sparrows. Over the green turf little
fountains spread the trickling web of their soft rain. Round-eyed,
slate-blue pigeons cooed in a sunlit tree. And all about him was the
perpetual hum of Paris, the roar of the carriages, the surging sea of
footsteps, the familiar street-cries, the gay distant whistle of a
china-mender, a navvy's hammer ringing out on the cobblestones, the
noble music of a fountain--all the fevered golden trappings of the
Parisian dream.--And the little hunchback, sitting astride his bench,
with his mouth full, never troubling to swallow, would drowse off into a
delicious torpor, in which he lost all consciousness of his twisted
spine and his craven soul, and was all steeped in an indeterminate
intoxicating happiness.

"... Soft warm light, sun of justice that art to shine for us to-morrow,
art thou not shining now? It is all so good, so beautiful! We are rich,
we are strong, we are hale, we love ... I love, I love all men, all men
love me.... Ah! How splendid it all is! How splendid it will be
to-morrow!..."