When he had passed, I essayed a further progress toward the Rue St. Denis; but the hedge of bayonets still bristled as ominously as ever. I went into a little tobacconist’s shop; and the pretty _marchande_ showed me a frightful trace of the passage of a cannon ball, which had gone right through the shutter and glass, smashed cases on cases of cigars, and half demolished the little tobacconist’s parlor.
My countrymen were in great force on the Boulevards, walking arm and arm, four abreast, as it is the proud custom of Britons to do. From them, I heard, how Major Pongo, of the Company’s service, would certainly have placed his sword at the disposal of the Government in support of law and order, had he not been confined to his bed with a severe attack of rheumatism: how Mr. Bellows, Parisian correspondent to the “Evening Grumbler,” had been actually led out to be shot, and was only saved by the interposition of his tailor, who was a sergeant in the National Guard; and who, passing by, though not on duty, exerted his influence with the military authorities, to save the life of Mr. Bellows; how the Reverend Mr. Faldstool, _ministre Anglican_, was discovered in a corn-bin, moaning piteously: how Bluckey, the man who talked so much about the Pytchley hounds, and of the astonishing leaps he had taken when riding after them, concealed himself in a coal-cellar, and lying down on his face, never stirred from that position from noon till midnight on Thursday (although I, to be sure, have no right to taunt him with his prudence): how, finally, M’Gropus, the Scotch surgeon, bolted incontinently in a cab, with an immense quantity of luggage, toward the _Chemin-de-fer du Nord_; and, being stopped in the Rue St. Denis, was ignominiously turned out of his vehicle by the mob; the cab, together with M’Gropus’s trunks, being immediately converted into the nucleus of a barricade:—how, returning the following morning to see whether he could recover any portion of his effects, he found the barricades in the possession of the military, who were quietly cooking their soup over a fire principally fed by the remnants of his trunks and portmanteaus; whereupon, frantically endeavoring to rescue some _disjecta membra_ of his property from the wreck, he was hustled and bonneted by the soldiery, threatened with arrest, and summary military vengeance, and ultimately paraded from the vicinity of the bivouac, by bayonets with sharp points.