“It just ain’t, if they’d only let us alone; but they won’t—them blessed Peelers I mean. How would you like it?” he continued, appealing to me with as hard a look in the face as if I had been his most implacable enemy, “how would you like it, if you had looked up a jolly good pitch, and a reg’lar good comp’ny was a looking on—at the west end, in a slap up street, where there ain’t no thoroughfare—and jist as you’re a doin’ the basin, and the browns is a droppin’ into the ’at, up comes a Peeler. Then it’s ‘Move on!’ You must go;” he stared harder than ever, and thumped his hand on the table; “I say you _must_ go, and lose p’raps a pick up as ’u’d keep you for a week. How would you like that?”
“Spostallate!—would you?” a slight curl of the lip, expressive of contempt at my ignorance of the general behaviour of policemen. “Ah! if you say ’bo!’ to a Peeler he pulls you, and what’s the consequence? Why, a month at the Steel!”—which hard name I understood to be given to the House of Correction.
“But the police are not unreasonable,” I suggested.
“Well, p’raps some of ’em ain’t,” he remarked, “but you can’t pick out your policemen, that’s where it is.”
“Do the police never interfere with you here?” I asked.
“They used to it; and I’ve had to beg back my traps more than once from the borough of the Police Correctionell, as they call it; but then that was ’cause I was hignorant of the law. When they see that I could git a ’onest living, an old cove in a cocked hat ses he to me, ses he, ‘You’re a saltimbanc, you are. Wery good. You go to the borough of police for public morals, and the minister (not a parson, mind you, but the ’ed hinspector), if he’s satisfied with your character he’ll give you a ticket.”
“Course he did; and I’m now one of the reg’lar perfession. I aint to be hinterfered with; leastways, without I’m donkey enough to go on the cross and be took up. _That’s_ the ticket,” he exclaimed triumphantly, pulling out a bronze badge, “I’m number thirty-five, I am.”
“No; the police picked out thirteen good places—‘pitches,’ we calls ’em—where we can play. Ther’s the list—thirteen on ’em all of a row—beginning on the Boulevards at the Place de la Colonne de Juilliet, and ending in the Champs Elysées.” He unfolded a neatly written document that plainly defined the limits of Paris within which he, in common with his co-professors, was allowed to display his abilities.