Close down to the stones it
throws its glare for two or three feet about, and into that
glare-emerges a hook--an iron hook--which pokes and prods at>out in
the gutters, and now and then fastens like a finger on a wisp of paper
and disappears behind the lamp. Following the hook with your eye, you
see that it deposits the wisps of paper in a deep basket fastened on
the back of a man. The is shaggy, dirty and begrimed. He wears a hat
which he has at some fished out of a gutter, a ragged blue blouse, a
raggeder apron, which was in its brighter days a coffee-sack, and
wooden shoes upon his feet. A short pipe, sometimes alight, but more
often empty, is in a corner of his mouth. No one needs to be told who
he is or what his calling. In the argot of the blousards he is known
as the Chevalier of the Hook.
The ragpicker of Paris has been often written of, but what I have read
of him has never shown him to me in quite the colors I have found him
in by personal observation and inquiry concerning his ways of life. He
has been somewhat idealized in print, I find. Victor Hugo has
presented him in a light not unlike that of Cooper's noble
savage--with large difference of color and pose, of course. The
average Frenchman knows Cooper's noble savage as well as we know
Hugo's romantic ragpicker, and he knows nothing of the American Indian
besides.
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