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over each other fell apart.
‘Down on all fours, brats!’ said Gavroche.
He made his guests enter the cage with great precaution,
then he crawled in after them, pulled the stones together,
and closed the opening hermetically again.
All three had stretched out on the mat. Gavroche still
had the cellar rat in his hand.
‘Now,’ said he, ‘go to sleep! I’m going to suppress the can-
delabra.’
‘Monsieur,’ the elder of the brothers asked Gavroche,
pointing to the netting, ‘what’s that for?’
‘That,’ answered Gavroche gravely, ‘is for the rats. Go to
sleep!’
Nevertheless, he felt obliged to add a few words of in-
struction for the benefit of these young creatures, and he
continued:—
‘It’s a thing from the Jardin des Plantes. It’s used for
fierce animals. There’s a whole shopful of them there. All
you’ve got to do is to climb over a wall, crawl through a win-
dow, and pass through a door. You can get as much as you
wa nt.’
As he spoke, he wrapped the younger one up bodily in a
fold of the blanket, and the little one murmured:—
‘Oh! how good that is! It’s warm!’
Gavroche cast a pleased eye on the blanket.
‘That’s from the Jardin des Plantes, too,’ said he. ‘I took
that from the monkeys.’
And, pointing out to the eldest the mat on which he was
lying, a very thick and admirably made mat, he added:—