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battledores for beating, she finds for herself. For permission to boil her clothes (if she wishes to do so) the cost is two sous a bundle. The charge for washing for a single hour is one sou and a half.

The 320 women were all dressed in clean caps. Besides the narrow tables on the gunwales, was a parallel and broader one within the boat, on which they completed their work; and accordingly, they were to be seen, first, with their faces towards the city, dipping their linen into the Seine, rapidly running beside them, and then lustily beating it on the narrow board; and afterwards with their backs to the metropolis, smoothing and laying out their clothes on the opposite boards of their cell, within each of which was just room enough for an industrious, lusty woman to turn herself round. In that portion of the Seine which flows through Paris there are no less than twenty of these boats, large and small, in which the linen of the poor and some of that of the wealthier classes is pummelled till it is clean.

As the chef was conducting me to a portion of the boat in which was a little steam-boiler for heating water, one of the 320 women suddenly stopped in the act of belabouring an aged shirt, and, with it in one hand, and with her wooden

battledore uplifted in the other, she made to me a very short, shrewd remark, indirectly expressive of thirst. "C'est une malhonnêteté," said the chef to her, with a very angry countenance, "de vous adresser comme ça à un étranger!"

The woman, with great humility and volubility, assured him she did not mean the slightest harm. He told her she ought to be ashamed of herself, that it was not her first offence, that she was much too fond of talking, that she talked to everybody. "Si le bon Dieu viendrait abord," said he to her, shaking his hand close to her. face, "vous lui parleriez !” 2

The chef, kindly accompanying me to the gunwale of his boat, now took off his hat and gave me his "adieu;" and as it was raining and hailing hard, I ran across the street into a little wine-shop, the counter of which was covered with very small tumblers. Close beside me stood a gentleman who, to save his new hat from the rain, had economically put over it a white pocket-handkerchief, the ends of which were amusingly contrasted with the black beard. under which they were tied. During the few minutes I was in this cabaret, men in blouses and

'It is very uncivil of you to speak to a stranger like that! 2 If the Almighty were to come on board, you would speak to Him!

women in white caps and occasionally in gold earrings kept dropping in to drink a glass, and sometimes two, of bright red wine (worth about fifteen sous a bottle, containing eight glasses), for each of which they paid two sous; and as soon as the amount purchased was tossed off, the customer, sometimes wiping and sometimes licking his or her healthy lips, walked out of the door, which, even during the storm, was always wide open.

What a difference between this simple refreshment and the horrid interior of our fine London gin-palaces, in which, in an atmosphere stinking of gin, young girls, old women, "ladies" with parasols and silk bags; men of all ages, from shabby-genteel attire down to jackets out at elbows, and with a bit of shirt inquisitively poking out of trousers behind, are to be seen entering through a swinging door, constructed on purpose to conceal them, to drink, at a zinc table slopped by the unsteady hands ranged in front of it, a liquid, the first effects of which may be seen in the ghastly countenances and collapsed attitudes of a row of drunkards seated on a bench opposite to the counter, in order to recover their senses sufficiently to enable them to walk "home."

The poisonous consequences of a system which, by enfeebling the stomach, enervating the mind,

debilitating the frame, and eventually ruining the happiness, character, and prospects of hundreds of thousands of people, may roughly be estimated by the dreadful fact (vide our Parliamentary returns) that there is annually consumed by the lower classes of Great Britain and Ireland, in beer, spirits, and tobacco, the enormous sum of fifty-seven millions sterling, and in spirits alone thirty millions!

On leaving the cabaret I had occasion to call at a shop, on the counter of which were lying a number of extremely dear but very good British tooth-brushes. The owner, a Scotchman, told me he sold a great number of that price and quality; "and yet," said he, with a slight smile, "one house in Paris sent to England last year a thousand dozen of cheap bad ones!"

THE PLACE DE GRÈVE.

AMONG the various colours and the innumerable lights and shadows composing those pictures which the painter is in the habit of exhibiting to the and the moralist to the mind, of man, eye,

there exists no contrast more striking than that which distinguishes the present and past tenses of the history of Paris. In the metropolis of France the surface of society is so smooth and unruffled, there exists everywhere such highly polished politeness, such gaiety of heart, such hospitality to strangers, so many amusements, and such a variety of apparently innocent amusements, that I often felt it almost impossible to believe that the place on which I stood basking in the sunshine I have described had been the scene of, and the people around me the actors in, a series of tragedies exhibiting the most furious passions and the most fearful results. The Place de Grève is, in the history of Paris, one of the most revolting localities the stranger could be induced to visit. For many centuries it was the

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