wine

game lasted. There was little roughness in the sport, and much

playfulness. There was a special companionship in it, and

observable inclination on the part of every one to join some other

one, which led, especially among the luckier or lighter-hearted, to

frolicsome embraces, drinking of healths, shaking of hands, and

even joining of hands and dancing, a dozen together. When the

wine was gone, and the places where it had been most abundant

were raked into a gridiron-pattern by fingers, these

demonstrations ceased, as suddenly as they had broken out. The

man who had left his saw sticking in the firewood he was cutting,

set it in motion again; the woman who had left on a door-step the

little pot of hot ashes, at which she had been trying to soften the

pain in her own starved fingers and toes, or in those of her child,

returned to it; men with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverous

faces, who had emerged into the winter light from cellars, moved

away, to descend again; and a gloom gathered on the scene that

appeared more natural to it than sunshine.

The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the

narrow street in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it

was spilled. It had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and

many naked feet, and many wooden shoes. The hands of the man

who sawed the wood, left red