Except for consumptive coughs, the misstep of a wooden leg of which the clumsy ferule slipped on a cobblestone, and the querulous whimper of a child, half-starved and imperfectly swaddled in a tattered shawl, on a flaccid bosom, the mob were silent in an expectation as intense as the lookers-on.

The wind brought the whistle of the railway locomotives and the clanking of a steam-dredger in the river, like a giant toiling in massive chains.
For this platoon of vice and misery, crime and disorder, laziness and rapine, the stranger confidently expected to see a commander appear whose flashing, fearless eye, and upright, powerful frame, would account for the awe in which all were held.
What was his amazement, therefore, to perceive--while a tremor of emotion thrilled the line and announced the commander whom all awaited--a bent-up, scarcely human-shaped form, hardly to be acknowledged a woman's.

It was enveloped in a heavily furred pelisse fitted for a man.
This singular object appeared up the trap of a cellarway, much like the opening of a sewer, on the opposite side of the street.

She proceeded to review the vagabonds and put questions and issue orders to each, which were received like mandates from Caesar by his legions.

The voice was fine and shrill, the movements betokened vigor, but the whole impression was that the female captain-general of the beggars of Munich was far from young.
In the obscurity, and keeping in the background as he did, it was not possible for the stranger to scan her features; besides, they were veiled by the long hair of a Polish hunter's cap, with earflaps and a drooping foxtail, worn as the pompon but half-loosened in time.