All the people within reach had suspended their business, or theiridleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough,irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed,one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures thatapproached them, had dammed it into little pools; these weresurrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according toits size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two handsjoined, and sipped, or tried to help women, to sip, before the wine had all run out between theirfingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugsof mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women'sheads, which were squeezed dry into infants' mouths; others made smallmud-embankments, to stern the wine as it ran; others, directed bylookers-on up at high windows, darted here and there, to cut offlittle streams of wine that started away in new directions; othersdevoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces of the cask,licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments witheager relish. There was no drainage to carry off the wine, and notonly did it all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up alongwith it, that there might have been a scavenger in the street, ifanybody acquainted with it could have believed in such a miraculouspresence. A shrill sound of laughter and of amused voices- voices of men,women, and children- resounded in the street while this wine gamelasted. There was little roughness in the sport, and much playfulness.There was a special companionship in it, an observable inclinationon the part of every one to join some other one, which led, especiallyamong the luckier or lighter-hearted, to frolicsome embraces, drinkingof healths, shaking of hands, and even joining of hands and dancing, adozen together. When the wine was gone, and the places where it hadbeen most abundant were raked into a gridiron-pattern by fingers,these demonstrations ceased, as suddenly as they had broken out. Theman who had left his saw sticking in the firewood he was cutting,set it in motion again; the women who had left on a door-step thelittle pot of hot ashes, at which she had been trying to soften thepain in her own starved fingers and toes, or in those of her child,returned to it; men with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverousfaces, who had emerged into the winter light from cellars, moved away,to descend again; and a gloom gathered on the scene that appeared morenatural to it than sunshine. The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrowstreet in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled.It had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet,and many wooden shoes. The hands of the man who sawed the wood, leftred marks on the billets; and the forehead of the woman who nursed herbaby, was stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about herhead again. Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, hadacquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker sobesmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap thanin it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees-BLOOD.