some shock necessary.

“What’s that you are gabbling about there?” he exclaimed. “Are you scoffing at me? Are you turning up your noses? Do you want the Tuileries? Are you brutes? Come, say! I warn you that I don’t belong to the regiment of simpletons. Ah, come now, are you brats from the Pope’s establishment?”

A little roughness is good in cases of fear. It is reassuring. The two children drew close to Gavroche.

Gavroche, paternally touched by this confidence, passed from grave to gentle, and addressing the smaller:⁠—

“Stupid,” said he, accenting the insulting word, with a caressing intonation, “it’s outside that it is black. Outside it’s raining, here it does not rain; outside it’s cold, here there’s not an atom of wind; outside there are heaps of people, here there’s no one; outside there ain’t even the moon, here there’s my candle, confound it!”

The two children began to look upon the apartment with less terror; but Gavroche allowed them no more time for contemplation.

“Quick,” said he.

And he pushed them towards what we are very glad to be able to call the end of the room.

There stood his bed.

Gavroche’s bed was complete; that is to say, it had a mattress, a blanket, and an alcove with curtains.

The mattress was a straw mat, the blanket a rather large strip of gray woollen stuff, very warm and almost new. This is what the alcove consisted of:⁠—

Three rather long poles, thrust into and consolidated, with the rubbish which formed the floor, that is to say, the belly of the elephant, two in front and one behind, and united by a rope at their summits, so as to form a pyramidal bundle. This cluster supported a trellis-work of brass wire which was simply placed upon it, but artistically applied, and held by fastenings of iron wire, so that it enveloped all three holes. A row of very heavy stones kept this network down to the floor so that nothing could pass under it. This grating was nothing else than a piece of the brass screens with which aviaries are covered in menageries. Gavroche’s bed stood as in a cage, behind this net. The whole resembled an Eskimo tent.

This trellis-work took the place of curtains.

Gavroche moved aside the stones which fastened the net down in front, and the two folds of the net which lapped over each other fell apart.

“Down on all fours, brats!” said Gavroche.

He made his guests enter the cage with great precaution, then he crawled in after them, pulled the stones together, and closed the opening hermetically again.

All three had stretched out on the mat. Gavroche still had the cellar rat in his hand.

“Now,” said he, “go to sleep! I’m going to suppress the candelabra.”

“Monsieur,” the elder of the brothers asked Gavroche, pointing to the netting, “what’s that for?”

“That,” answered Gavroche gravely, “is for the rats. Go to sleep!”

Nevertheless, he felt obliged to add a few words of instruction for the benefit of these young creatures, and he continued:⁠—

“It’s a thing from the Jardin des Plantes. It’s used for fierce animals. There’s a whole shopful of them there. All you’ve got to do is to climb over a wall, crawl through a window, and pass through a door. You can get as much as you want.”

As he spoke, he wrapped the younger one up bodily in a fold of the blanket, and the little one murmured:⁠—

“Oh! how good that is! It’s warm!”

Gavroche cast a pleased eye on the blanket.

“That’s from the Jardin des Plantes, too,” said he. “I took that from the monkeys.”

And, pointing out to the eldest the mat on which he was lying, a very thick and admirably made mat, he added:⁠—

“That belonged to the giraffe.”

After a pause he went on:⁠—

“The beasts had all these things. I took them away from them. It didn’t trouble them. I told them: ‘It’s for the elephant.’ ”

He paused, and then resumed:⁠—

“You crawl over the walls and you don’t care a straw for the government. So there now!”

The two children gazed with timid and stupefied respect on this intrepid and ingenious being, a vagabond like themselves, isolated like themselves, frail like themselves, who had something admirable and all-powerful about him, who seemed supernatural to them, and whose physiognomy was composed of all the grimaces of an old mountebank, mingled with the most ingenuous and charming smiles.

“Monsieur,” ventured the elder timidly, “you are not afraid of the police, then?”

Gavroche contented himself with replying:⁠—

“Brat! Nobody says ‘police,’ they say ‘bobbies.’ ”

The smaller had his eyes wide open, but he said nothing. As he was on the edge of the mat, the elder being in the middle, Gavroche tucked the blanket round him as a mother might have done, and heightened the mat under his head with old rags, in such a way as to form a pillow for the child. Then he turned to the elder:⁠—

“Hey! We’re jolly comfortable here, ain’t we?”

“Ah, yes!” replied the elder, gazing at Gavroche with the expression of a saved angel.

The two poor little children who had been soaked through, began to grow warm once more.

“Ah, by the way,” continued Gavroche, “what were you bawling about?”

And pointing out the little one to his brother:⁠—

“A mite like that, I’ve nothing to say about, but the idea of a big fellow like you crying! It’s idiotic; you looked like a calf.”

“Gracious,” replied the child, “we have no lodging.”

“Bother!” retorted Gavroche, “you don’t say ‘lodgings,’ you say ‘crib.’ ”

“And then, we were afraid of being alone like that at night.”

“You don’t say ‘night,’ you say ‘darkmans.’ ”

“Thank you, sir,” said the child.

“Listen,” went on Gavroche, “you must never bawl again over anything. I’ll take care of you. You shall see what fun we’ll have. In summer, we’ll go to the Glacière with Navet, one of my pals, we’ll bathe in the Gare, we’ll run stark naked in front of the rafts on the bridge at Austerlitz⁠—that makes the laundresses raging. They scream, they get mad, and if you only knew how ridiculous they are! We’ll go and see the man-skeleton. And