straps that held up their pallets, and, at the risk of breaking up the mouldy boards of the floor, tumbled the mass of sleepers brutally out on the floor.
Accustomed to listening to cases in the police-court, whiling away hours with second-offenders and apprentice-criminals who allured him with tales of the exploits of their comrades, delighting in contact with rubbish impregnated with the odor of adventure, Paridael owed it to a miracle that he was not implicated in some affair or other carried off by these footpads who terrorized the district.
He knew more than one member of the celebrated bands established in the blind alleys of populous suburbs; at Stuivenberg, at Doelhof, at Roggeveld and Kerkeveld. The police watched him and took him for an eccentric, a cracked, inoffensive idiot. They watched him more carefully than had been their wont because of his shameless friendship with the cream of old offenders; the Herring, Tailless, Flower o' the Sewer.
He also had had a nickname bestowed upon him. It was not the first; formerly, in his own set, Béjard, Saint-Fardier, Felicité and even Regina had affected to see nothing but the too rosy color of his cheeks, and had called him the Peasant. The people among whom he now lived, on the other hand, noticed the whiteness and the smallness of his hands, the arch of his feminine foot, the fineness of his build; and for the fullbreasted receivers of stolen goods, for the big-fisted and solidly built rogues, he was the Jonker, the Squireen.
How had he been able to make himself loved by all these apaches, instead of being found one morning stabbed and gutted in some back yard, or dragged out
