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Updated: June 17, 2025
Once upon a time I set about developing this father spirit in a group of little gamins whose general attitude toward the weaker sex, toward birds and flowers and insects, toward beauty in distress and wounded sensibility, was in the last degree offensive. In the bird games we had always had a mother bird in the nest with the birdlings; we now introduced a father bird into the game.
By the standards of conventional propriety her act was the maddest folly; and yet she was still happy over it. There was one disquieting trait about him that made her a little uneasy. He used the catch-words of the street gamins of New York without any consciousness of incongruity.
And is it not a good quarter of an hour's amusement every afternoon to watch the gourmets feasting their eyes on the day's fare? And the gamins from the poor quarters stare in also, and wonder what those black lumps are. Opposite Potel's is a shop, the like of which we have not, nor, we verily believe, has any other city. It is the show-store of the far-famed Algerian Onyx Company.
In their frantic merriment they dared to sing aloud some of the little ambiguous, equivocal chansons, which belonged to the gamins of Paris, and at which the Marquise de Pompadour laughed till she shed tears when sung sometimes by the merry courtiers. In vain the grand-master besought them, in his most polished manner, not to sing at table.
'Momiers' or 'Mummers, a name in itself of far greater offence, has obtained in Switzerland something of the same allowance. Exactly in the same way 'Capuchin' was at first a jesting nickname, given by the gamins in the streets to that reformed branch of the Franciscans which afterwards accepted it as their proper designation.
Nuts and apple parings fly hither and thither; oranges describe perilous parabolas between the pit and the gallery; adventurous gamins make daring excursions round the upper rails; dialogues maintained across the house, and quarrels supported by means of an incredible copiousness of invective, mingle in discordant chorus with all sorts of howlings, groanings, whistlings, crowings, and yelpings, above which, in shrillest treble, rise the voices of cake and apple-sellers, and the piercing cry of the hump-back who distributes "vaudevilles at five centimes apiece."
Now pee-wee is not permitted in the streets of New York. I didn't know that, but I learned pretty lively. I had paused possibly thirty seconds, in which time I had learned the cause of the crowd, when I heard a gamin yell "Bull!" The gamins knew their business. They ran. I didn't. The crowd broke up immediately and started for the sidewalk on both sides of the street.
The struggle had sapped my last strength, however; and with the first whiff of the gutters, the first rush of barefooted gamins under my horse's hoofs, the first babel of street cries the first breath, in a word, of Paris there came a new temptation; to go for one last night to Zaton's, to see the tables again and the faces of surprise, to be for an hour or two the old Berault.
I am sure that no one ever felt any repugnance on being introduced by Cervantes to the muleteers, contrabandistas, servants and serving-maids, and idle vagabonds of Spain, any more than to an acquaintance with the beggar-boys and street gamins on the canvases of Murillo.
"Then he grabbed me and shouted for the police, and I was painfully surprised to find that instead of coping with a mysterious being from another world, I had two hundred and ten pounds of flesh and blood to handle. The populace began to gather. The million and a half of small boys of whom I have already spoken mostly street gamins, owing to the lateness of the hour sprang up from all about us.
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