New York, large wooden boxes
into which the domestics or tenement-holders empty the accumulated
dust of the past day. Round these boxes gather and pass on, when the
work is done, to fresh fields of labour and pastures new, squalid
hungry-looking men and women, the implements of whose craft consist
of a coarse bag or basket slung over the shoulder and a little rake
with which they turn over and probe and examine in the minutest manner
the dustbins. They pick up and deposit in their baskets, by aid of
their rakes, whatever they may find, with the same facility as a
Chinaman uses his chopsticks.

Paris is a city of centralisation--and centralisation and
classification are closely allied. In the early times, when
centralisation is becoming a fact, its forerunner is classification.
All things which are similar or analogous become grouped together, and
from the grouping of groups rises one whole or central point. We see
radiating many long arms with innumerable tentaculae, and in the
centre rises a gigantic head with a comprehensive brain and keen eyes
to look on every side and ears sensitive to hear--and a voracious
mouth to swallow.

Other cities resemble all the birds and beasts and fishes whose
appetites and digestions are normal. Paris alone is the analogical
apotheosis of the octopus. Product of centralisation carried to an _ad
absurdum_, it fairly represents the devil fish; and in no respects is
the resemblance more curious than in the similarity of the digestive
apparatus.

Those intelligent tourists who, having surrendered their individuality
into the hands of Messrs. Cook or Gaze, 'do' Paris in three days, are
often puzzled to know how it is that the dinner which in London would
cost about six shillings, can be had for three francs in a cafe in the
Palais Royal. They need have no more wonder if they will but consider
the classification which is a theoretic speciality of Parisian life,
and adopt all round the fact from which the chiffonier has his
genesis.

The Paris of 1850 was not like the Paris of to-day, and those who see
the Paris of Napoleon and Baron Hausseman can hardly realise the
existence of the state of things forty-five years ago.

Amongst other things, however, which have not changed are those
districts where the waste is gathered. Dust is dust all the world
over, in every age, and the family likeness of dust-heaps is perfect.
The traveller, therefore, who visits the environs of Montrouge can go