Scenes of the Siege of Paris.
From the French of Alphonse Daudet.
[Alphonse Daudet, the most brilliant of French novelists alive, was born at Nimes in 1840. His parents were not rich, and he started life by drudging as an usher. Then he resolved to break his chains, and to earn his bread at Paris with his pen. He began by painting in the Figaro, with great graphic power, the miseries of ushers in provincial schools. Then he turned to writing stories, with the success to which he owes his world-wide fame. Most of his novels are well known in England; but the characteristic little stories here translated will probably be new to English readers.]
I.—THE BOY SPY.
"HE WOULD TAKE HIS PLACE IN THE LONG LINE."
IS name was Stenne: they called him Little Stenne.
He was a thorough child of Paris; delicate-looking, pale, about ten years old—perhaps fifteen—one never can tell the ages of these scaramouches. His mother was dead; his father, an old marine, used to guard a square in the Temple quarter. Babies, nursemaids, the old women with folding-chairs, poor mothers—all the leisurely-moving world of Paris which puts itself out of the way of carriages in those gardens—knew Father Stenne, and worshipped him. People knew that under that bristling moustache, the terror of dogs and
