e been forced to move, since our ants will wander, and the neighbors
complain when their pantries are full, and justly.

"Now eight and even ten sacks of ants come to me from Germany and many
places. I am busy always, and there is money enough for all; but I have
sent the children away, for they are girls, and for each I save a little
_dot_, and I will not have them know this _metier_, and be so bitten
that they, too, are tanned like me and have never more their pretty
fresh skins. Near us now, madame, is another woman, but her trade is
less good than mine. She is a bait-breeder, '_une eleveure des
asticots_.' All about her room hang old stockings. In them she puts bran
and flour and bits of cork, and soon the red worms show themselves, and
once there she has no more thought than to let them grow and to sell
them for eight and sometimes ten sous a hundred. But I like better my
ants, which are clean, and which, if they run everywhere, do not
wriggle nor squirm nor make you think always of corruption and death.
She breeds other worms for the fishermen, who buy them at the shops for
fishing tackle; but often she also buys worms from others and feeds them
a little time till plump, but I find them even more disgusting.

"An ant has so much intelligence. I can watch mine, madame, as if they
were people almost, and would even believe they know me. But that does
not hinder them from biting me; no, never; and because they are always
upon me the neighbors and all who know me have chosen to call me the
'sister-in-law of ants.'

"It is not a trade for women, it is true, save for one only here and
there. But it is better than sewing; yes, far better; and I wish all
women might have something as good, since now I prosper when once I ate
only bread. What shall be done, madame, to make it that more than bread
becomes possible for these workers?"

CHAPTER XX.

FROM FRANCE TO ITALY.

In Paris, its fulness of brilliant life so dominates that all shadows
seem to fly before it and poverty and pain to have no place, and the
same feeling holds for the chief cities of the continent. It is Paris
that is the key-note of social life, and in less degree its influence
makes itself felt even at remote distances, governing production and
fixing the rate of wages paid. Modern improvement has swept away slums,
and it is only here and there, in cities like Berlin or Vienna, that one
comes upon anything which deserves the name.

The Ghett