rooms with the high Flemish beds, the crucifix hanging over the bed,
and prints--not always devout--on the walls, to the sitting-room with
its shining mirror, highly polished tin and brass candlesticks and
platters, and abundant china. She was a staunch Imperialist, and had
portraits of the Emperor, with prints of Solferino and of Sedan. 'There
it was that they betrayed him!' said the little old lady, with deep
indignation in her voice. I had not the heart to ask her who these
traitors were. The garrets I found filled with new-mown hay. 'It keeps
there till we sell it,' she said, 'and then it smells so sweet!' which
was undeniable. Behind her house (her son and his wife were both absent
at their work) she showed us the garden, very trimly kept and gay with
the old familiar flowers, and an arbour, in which she took especial
pride, none of her neighbours possessing anything of the sort.

At Thiers I talked with an officer of the company who had served for
some time in one of the great mines of Southern France. The differences
in the habits and character of the mining populations there and here he
found very great, and, on the whole, he evidently thought the Northern
miners much superior, in most essential points, to their fellows at the
South. Certainly, according to him, they are neater in their persons,
more cool and sensible, less credulous, less addicted to politics, and
much more thrifty. 'The women, when they are well-behaved and good
managers,' he said, 'have more influence with the men in the North. In
the South and in Auvergne, I have sometimes thought the worst women had
more influence with the men than the best.'

He had an odd theory as to the effect of great altitudes on human
character. 'In Auvergne and in Savoy,' he said, 'the higher up you go
the more excitable and quarrelsome you find the people. Here in Flanders
the people are placid, like the plains.' He called my attention, too, to
the prevalence among the miners here at Anzin of a peculiar type of
blonds with a sort of ruddy russet hair and beard, not quite the glowing
Titianesque auburn, and yet by no means red. It is certainly a marked
and peculiar tint, and may be seen faithfully reproduced in a large
picture of the Anzin miners exhibited this year at Paris. I had supposed
it to 'hark back' to the Scandinavians, who made themselves so much at
home in all these fat and accessible regions after Charlemagne passed
away.

'No,' said my philosophic en