I dropped a small piece of money into the hat he was holding out, and passed on quickly.

I had just fallen unexpectedly upon the two saddest secrets of the disease which troubles the age we live in:  the envious hatred of him who suffers want, and the selfish forgetfulness of him who lives in affluence.

All the enjoyment of my walk was gone; I left off looking about me, and retired into my own heart.  The animated and moving sight in the streets gave place to inward meditation upon all the painful problems which have been written for the last four thousand years at the bottom of each human struggle, but which are propounded more clearly than ever in our days.

I pondered on the uselessness of so many contests, in which defeat and victory only displace each other by turns, and on the mistaken zealots who have repeated from generation to generation the bloody history of Cain and Abel; and, saddened with these mournful reflections, I walked on as chance took me, until the silence all around insensibly drew me out from my own thoughts.

I had reached one of the remote streets, in which those who would live in comfort and without ostentation, and who love serious reflection, delight to find a home.  There were no shops along the dimly lighted street; one heard no sounds but of distant carriages, and of the steps of some of the inhabitants returning quietly home.

I instantly recognized the street, though I had been there only once before.

That was two years ago.  I was walking at the time by the side of the Seine, to which the lights on the quays and bridges gave the aspect of a lake surrounded by a garland of stars; and I had reached the Louvre, when I was stopped by a crowd collected near the parapet they had gathered round a child of about six, who was crying, and I asked the cause of his tears.

“It seems that he was sent to walk in the Tuileries,” said a mason, who was returning from his work with his trowel in his hand; “the servant who took care of him met with some friends there, and told the child to wait for him while he went to get a drink; but I suppose the drink made him more thirsty, for he has not come back, and the child cannot find his way home.”

“Why do they not ask him his name, and where he lives?”

“They have been doing it for the last hour; but all he can say is, that he is called Charles, and that his father is Monsieur Duval—­there are twelve hundred Duvals in Paris.”

“Then he does not know in what part of the town he lives?”

“I should not think, indeed!  Don’t you see that he is a gentleman’s child?  He has never gone out except in a carriage or with a servant; he does not know what to do by himself.”

Here the mason was interrupted by some of the voices rising above the others.

“We cannot leave him in the street,” said some.

“The child-stealers would carry him off,” continued others.