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Rh himself with compromising allies. He rejected all of them without snubbing them too greatly. Good folk would suffice for the business in hand.

Policemen had tried to disperse the assembled crowd, but they did not insist in the face of the dignified manner, portentous in its calm, with which they were welcomed by the mutineers.

A rather long street, the Canal au Sucre, separates the Grand' Place from the Scheldt, but two hundred meters was no distance for these fellows, and the policemen, sly but puny, would not be heavy to carry as far as the water.

"What are they going to do?" the police asked themselves. They were alarmed by the inertia and the resolute and slightly ironic air of the dockers. The loafers of the Coin du Paresseux were not more offensive while waiting for the baes who steeped them in drink. To those who questioned them the workers responded with a certain vade retro as brief as it was energetic, untranslatable in any other idiom than their terrible Flemish, and to which their manner of making it ring out added an eloquent savor.

The windows of the left wing on the second floor of the ancient Hotel de Ville were illumined. It appeared that they were still deliberating. The vote was imminent; all those people were hand in glove with each other.

Nine o'clock pealed forth. At the last stroke, at a whistle from Vingerhout, the workers leaned over and phlegmatically set about pulling up the paving stones beneath them. They went about their work rapidly, so rapidly that the alguazils got out of breath uselessly in trying to prevent them.

And then Jean Vingerhout, in order to show how