Alighting we passed through a small boozing ken, where a frowzy woman presided over a bar, serving drinks to smocked marketmen, and at the rear descended a steep flight of stone steps.  At the foot of the stairs we came on two gendarmes who sat side by side on a wooden bench, having apparently nothing else to do except to caress their goatees and finger their swords.  Whether the gendarmes were stationed here to keep the Apaches from preying on the marketmen or the marketmen from preying on the Apaches I know not; but having subsequently purchased some fresh fruit in that selfsame market I should say now that if anybody about the premises needed police protection it was the Apaches.  My money would be on the marketmen every time.

Beyond the couchant gendarmes we traversed a low, winding passage cut out of stone and so came at length to what seemingly had originally been a winevault, hollowed out far down beneath the foundations of the building.  The ceiling was so low that a tall man must stoop to avoid knocking his head off.  The place was full of smells that had crawled in a couple of hundred years before and had died without benefit of clergy, and had remained there ever since.  For its chief item of furniture the cavern had a wicked old piano, with its lid missing, so that its yellowed teeth showed in a perpetual snarl.  I judged some of its most important vital organs were missing too—­after I heard it played.  On the walls were inscribed such words as naughty little boys write on schoolhouse fences in this country, and more examples of this pleasing brand of literature were carved on the whittled oak benches and the rickety wooden stools.  So much for the physical furbishings.

By rights—­by all the hallowed rules and precedents of the American vaudeville stage!—­the denizens of this cozy retreat in the bowels of the earth should have been wearing high-waisted baggy velvet trousers and drinking absinthe out of large flagons, and stabbing one another between the shoulder blades, and ever and anon, in the mystic mazes of the dance, playing crack-the-whip with the necks and heels of their adoring lady friends; but such was not found to be the case.  In all these essential and traditional regards the assembled Innocents were as poignantly disappointing as the costers of London had proved themselves.

According to all the printed information on the subject the London coster wears clothes covered up with pearl buttons and spends his time swapping ready repartee with his Donah or his Dinah.  The costers I saw were barren of pearl buttons and silent of speech; and almost invariably they had left their Donahs at home.  Similarly these gentlemen habitues of the Cave of the Innocents wore few or no velvet pants, and guzzled little or none of the absinthe.  Their favorite tipple appeared to be beer; and their female companions snuggled closely beside them.

We stayed among them fully twenty minutes, but not a single person was stabbed while we were there.  It must have been an off-night for stabbings.