luous," and employer and
employed alike wonder why the earth holds them, and what good there is
in an existence made up simply of want and struggle.

Precisely the opposite condition holds for the French worker, who, in
the midst of problems as grave, faces them with the light-heartedness of
her nation. She has learned to the minutest fraction what can be
extracted from every centime, and though she too must shiver with cold,
and go half-fed and half-clothed, every to-morrow holds the promise of
something better, and to-day is thus made more bearable. She shares too
the conviction, which has come to be part of the general faith
concerning Paris, which seems always an embodied assurance, that sadness
and want are impossible. Even her beggars, a good proportion of them
laboriously made up for the parts they are to fill, find repression of
cheerfulness their most difficult task, and smile confidingly on the
sceptical observer of their methods, as if to make him a partner in the
encouraging and satisfactory nature of things in general. The little
seamstress who descends from her attic for the bread with its possible
salad or bit of cheese which will form her day's ration, smiles also as
she pauses to feel the thrill of life in the thronging boulevards and
beautiful avenues, the long sweeps of which have wiped out for Paris as
a whole everything that could by any chance be called slum.

Even in the narrowest street this stir of eager life penetrates, and
every Parisian shares it and counts it as a necessity of daily
existence. If shoes are too great a luxury, the workwoman clatters along
in _sabots_, congratulating herself that they are cheap and that they
never wear out. Custom, long-established and imperative, orders that she
shall wear no head-covering, and thus she escapes the revelation bound
up in the London worker's bonnet. Inherited instinct and training from
birth have taught her hands the utmost skill with the needle. She makes
her own dress, and wears it with an air which may in time transfer
itself to something choicer; and this quality is in no whit affected by
the the cheapness of the material. It may be only a print or some
woollen stuff of the poorest order; but it and every detail of her dress
represent something to which the English woman has not attained, and
which temperament and every fact of life will hinder her attaining.

As I write, the charcoal-woman has climbed the long flights to the fifth
floor