Another expressive shrug, as if to say “Who knows?” (These French boys can talk more with their arms and shoulders than other people can with their tongues.)
But when he saw the sou in hand he had expression enough all over him for a dozen boys. He took it with the invariable “Merci, Monsieur,” and darting away, in a minute re-appeared with a loaf of black bread, and was as willing to be communicative as you desired.
All that could be gathered from him was that his mother was a washerwoman, his father the Lord only knew, and he had been living on the streets as long as he could remember anything. That was all. That was his beginning—his end was in the hands of fate; possibly one thing, and possibly another, but, one thing or another, he had bread enough to last him twenty-four hours, and he was more happy than many a man in a palace.
A TALK WITH A GAMIN.
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.