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Throughout this mob the hat shooters came and went, proud of the triumph of their leader, and leaving in their wake, as it were, little trails of glory. In front of the house of the baobab there were two large handcarts. From time to time the gate was opened and one could see men walking busily about in the garden. They carried out trunks, cases and carpet-bags which they piled onto the carts.
This reserve army, which embraces an immense multitude during the crisis and a large number during the period which may be regarded as the average between the highest prosperity and the crisis, is the "surplus population" of England, which keeps body and soul together by begging, stealing, street-sweeping, collecting manure, pushing handcarts, driving donkeys, peddling, or performing occasional small jobs.
Calm and proud, though a little pale, he marched down the pathway, inspected his handcarts and seeing that all was in order set off jauntily on the road to the station, without looking back even once at the house of the baobab. On his arrival at the station he was greeted by the station-master, a former soldier, who shook him warmly by the hand several times.
Some mend their broken fortunes by prudent alliances, and some leave a numerous progeny to pass into the obscurity from which their ancestors emerged; so that you may see on handcarts and cobblers' stalls names which, a few generations back, were upon parchments with broad seals, and tombstones with armorial bearings. In a large city, this class of citizens is familiar to us in the streets.
The swelling and towering omnibuses, the huge trucks and wagons and carriages, the impetuous hansoms and the more sobered four-wheelers, the pony-carts, donkey-carts, handcarts, and bicycles which fearlessly find their way amid the turmoil, with foot-passengers winding in and out, and covering the sidewalks with their multitude, give the effect of a single monstrous organism, which writhes swiftly along the channel where it had run in the figure of a flood till you were tired of that metaphor.
There were no horses or chariots in the street, but there were handcarts and low trolleys running on thick log-wheels, and porters carrying packets on their heads, and a good many of the people were riding on what looked like elephants, only the great beasts were hairy, and they had not that mild expression we are accustomed to meet on the faces of the elephants at the Zoo.
While the benches before the Grotto and the vast reserved space were filling with sick people, handcarts, and stretchers, the crowd, the immense crowd, swayed about on the outskirts.
And yet, there were women wheeling handcarts full of yellow crocus buds about. He stopped and bought some for Yvonne. "She will like them," he thought. "Ah!" he turned away, leaving flowers and money. The old flower-woman crossed herself. No he would not go home just yet.
While the benches before the Grotto and the vast reserved space were filling with sick people, handcarts, and stretchers, the crowd, the immense crowd, swayed about on the outskirts.
Jules, thinking that he recognized that face, felt an impulse to stop, and at the same instant the carriage came to a standstill; for the postilion, hemmed in by some handcarts, had too much respect for the game to call upon the players to make way for him. "It is he!" said Jules, beholding in that human wreck, Ferragus XXIII., chief of the Devorants.
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