they
will learn to wait when they find they will not be waited for. Social
virtues, are, in a great degree, good habits. How many great qualities
are grafted into nations by their geographical position, by political
necessity, and by institutions! Avarice was destroyed for a time among
the Lacedaemonians by the creation of an iron coinage, too heavy and too
bulky to be conveniently hoarded.

I found myself in a carriage with two middle-aged women belonging to the
domestic and retired class of Parisians I have spoken of above. A few
civilities were sufficient to gain me their confidence, and after some
minutes I was acquainted with their whole history.

They were two poor sisters, left orphans at fifteen, and had lived ever
since, as those who work for their livelihood must live, by economy and
privation. For the last twenty or thirty years they had worked in jewelry
in the same house; they had seen ten masters succeed one another, and
make their fortunes in it, without any change in their own lot. They had
always lived in the same room, at the end of one of the passages in the
Rue St. Denis, where the air and the sun are unknown. They began their
work before daylight, went on with it till after nightfall, and saw year
succeed to year without their lives being marked by any other events than
the Sunday service, a walk, or an illness.

The younger of these worthy work-women was forty, and obeyed her sister
as she did when a child. The elder looked after her, took care of her,
and scolded her with a mother's tenderness. At first it was amusing;
afterward one could not help seeing something affecting in these two
gray-haired children, one unable to leave off the habit of obeying, the
other that of protecting.

And it was not in that alone that my two companions seemed younger than
their years; they knew so little that their wonder never ceased. We had
hardly arrived at Clamart before they involuntarily exclaimed, like the
king in the children's game, that they "did not think the world was so
great"!

It was the first time they had trusted themselves on a railroad, and it
was amusing to see their sudden shocks, their alarms, and their
courageous determinations: everything was a marvel to them! They had
remains of youth within them, which made them sensible to things which
usually only strike us in childhood. Poor creatures! they had still the
feelings of another age, though they had lost its charms.

But was there no