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get their breakfast, the waiters of a restaurant on the lower floor of the house kept shouting out the customers’ orders.

“Will those scoundrels never be quiet?” said Marcel.

“Every word is like the stroke of a pick, hollowing out my stomach.”

“The wind is in the north,” said Colline, gravely, pointing to a weathercock on a neighboring roof. “We shall not breakfast to-day, the elements are opposed to it.”

“How so,” inquired Marcel.

“It is an atmospheric phenomenon I have noted,” said the philosopher; “a wind from the north almost always means abstinence, as one from the south usually means pleasure and good cheer. It is what philosophy calls a warning from above.”

Gustave Colline’s fasting jokes were savage ones.

At that moment Schaunard, who had plunged one of his hands into the abyss that served him as a pocket, withdrew it with a yell of pain.

“Help, there is something in my coat!” he cried, trying to free his hand, nipped fast in the claws of a live lobster.

To the cry he had uttered another one replied. It came from Marcel, who, mechanically putting his hand into his pocket, had there discovered a silver mine that he had forgotten—that is to say, the hundred and fifty francs which the Jew Medicis had given him the day before in payment for “ The Passage of the Red Sea.”

Memory returned at the same moment to the Bohemians.

“Bow down, gentlemen,” said Marcel, spreading out on the table a pile of five-franc pieces, amongst which glittered some new louis.

“One would think they were alive,” said Colline.

“Sweet sounds,” said Schaunard, chinking the gold-pieces together.