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It was like a rat you've seen running along the gutter side of the curbstone with a terrier after it. "What's the matter, Farwell?" I asked. "Oh, my God!" he whispered. "What's happened?" "It's hard to tell you," said he. "Oh, but it's hard to tell." "Want some whiskey?" I asked, reaching for a decanter that stood handy. He nodded and I gave him good allowance.
"Stop that!" she said quite angrily, "or I'll dump you all in the gutter!" The threat was enough to send each to a corner of the basket, where they eyed each other and tried to think up some less boisterous game. It was beginning to rain steadily outside, and the water trickled through the top of the basket. Every time a drop hit one, he squealed, but no one dared to jump and run around.
Well, he went off that day and treated some friends, and then, for three days afterward, lay in the gutter, the entreaties of his wife and children having no effect on him. He swore he was free, and would do as he 'd d pleased. He had previously been a class-leader in his church, but after getting free-papers, he forsook his previous associates, and spent his Sundays and evenings in a bar-room.
It builds bouses with cards or sticks; it navigates the little ocean of a bowl of water with a paper boat; or dams the stream of a gutter, and contrives something which it calls a mill; and it interests itself in the fate of its works with a care that resembles affection.
The buildings were small and dilapidated, there was a good deal of rubbish on the sidewalks and in the streets, a few ragged children were playing in the gutter near by, shivering with cold as they ran about in bare, dirty feet, and a drunken man, leaning against a post on the opposite corner, was talking affectionately to some imaginary person in the vicinity.
Dawn awakens minds as it does the birds; all began to talk. Joly, perceiving a cat prowling on a gutter, extracted philosophy from it. "What is the cat?" he exclaimed. "It is a corrective. The good God, having made the mouse, said: 'Hullo! I have committed a blunder. And so he made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse.
In former days, accompanied by good Abbe Rose, visiting despairing ones, distributing alms, picking up children who had sunk to the gutter, he had a hundred times perambulated every one of those long, densely populated streets.
But the old gentleman did not dry there, but went on drip, drip, dripping among the cinders, and the fire fizzed, and sputtered, and began to look very black, and uncomfortable: never was such a cloak; every fold in it ran like a gutter.
The story was told twice over in jerks and snatches, just as it had been told to the Canadian, only the obscene words were unuttered and the oaths, when they slipped out now and then, were followed by apologies. Every soldier, even a Lancashire gutter snipe, has in him this curious instinct.
The light that had loitered in the corners crept upward to the roofs, cast its last rays upon the highest windowpanes, followed by the birds, the swallows, which saluted the close of day with a farewell chirp from the gutter where they were huddled together. "Now, where shall we go?" said Planus, as they left the restaurant. "Wherever you wish."
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