little heaps of tomatoes and slices of pumpkin which gleamed like red stars and golden crescents amidst the pale hues of the other vegetables.  Cadine evinced much more dexterity than Marjolin, although she was younger.  The peelings of the potatoes she pared were so thin that you could see through them; she tied up the bundles for the soup-pot so artistically that they looked like bouquets; and she had a way of making the little heaps she set up, though they contained but three carrots or turnips, look like very big ones.  The passers-by would stop and smile when she called out in her shrill childish voice:  “Madame! madame! come and try me!  Each little pile for two sous.”

She had her regular customers, and her little piles and bundles were widely known.  Old Mother Chantemesse, seated between the two children, would indulge in a silent laugh which made her bosom rise almost to her chin, at seeing them working away so seriously.  She paid them their daily sous most faithfully.  But they soon began to weary of the little heaps and bundles; they were growing up, and began to dream of some more lucrative business.  Marjolin remained very childish for his years, and this irritated Cadine.  He had no more brains than a cabbage, she often said.  And it was, indeed, quite useless for her to devise any plan for him to make money; he never earned any.  He could not even do an errand satisfactorily.  The girl, on the other hand, was very shrewd.  When but eight years old she obtained employment from one of those women who sit on a bench in the neighbourhood of the markets provided with a basket of lemons, and employ a troop of children to go about selling them.  Carrying the lemons in her hands and offering them at two for three sous, Cadine thrust them under every woman’s nose, and ran after every passer-by.  Her hands empty, she hastened back for a fresh supply.  She was paid two sous for every dozen lemons that she sold, and on good days she could earn some five or six sous.  During the following year she hawked caps at nine sous apiece, which proved a more profitable business; only she had to keep a sharp look-out, as street trading of this kind is forbidden unless one be licensed.  However, she scented a policeman at a distance of a hundred yards; and the caps forthwith disappeared under her skirts, whilst she began to munch an apple with an air of guileless innocence.  Then she took to selling pastry, cakes, cherry-tarts, gingerbread, and thick yellow maize biscuits on wicker trays.  Marjolin, however, ate up nearly the whole of her stock-in-trade.  At last, when she was eleven years old, she succeeded in realising a grand idea which had long been worrying her.  In a couple of months she put by four francs, bought a small hotte,[*] and then set up as a dealer in birds’ food.

[*] A basket carried on the back.—­Translator.