of
boys, who delighted in their regular military drill. He thought them,
after only eighteen months' training, one of the best boy-battalions in
the department, and would have liked to take them to Paris to compete
for the athletic prizes. But to take up even a picked company of ten
would have cost 400 francs, which he thought, and I agreed with him,
might be better spent in Thiers. 'And then,' he said with a smile, 'what
a life I should have led in Paris, with those ten boys to look after!'

The Anzin Company used to spend 80,000 francs a year on keeping up its
own schools. But it is so heavily taxed for the 'school palaces' which
have been put up, and for the public schools, that it has materially
reduced this outlay, though it still expends a large sum in various ways
for the advantage of the children of its own workmen attending the
public schools; and still keeps up certain religious schools, especially
for the little children and the girls.

One of these schools for little children which I visited at St.-Waast,
kept by the Sisters, was a model. The little creatures, ranged in
categories according to their years, were pictures of health and good
humour, as they sate in rows at their little desks, or marched about,
singing in choruses. One exercise, through which a number of them, from
six to eight years old, were conducted by two of the Sisters, might have
been studied from a fresco by Fra Angelico representing the heavenly
choirs, and gave the most intense delight evidently to the singing
children as well as to the smiling and kindly Sisters. There is a large
church, too, at St.-Waast and a _cite ouvriere_.

The commune, I believe, formerly was a part of the wide domain of the
famous Abbey of St.-Waast which grew up near Arras over the burial-place
of St.-Vadasius, to whom after the victory of Clovis over the Germans at
Tolbiac in 495 the duty was confided of teaching the Frankish king his
Christian catechism. He had a tough pupil, but he taught him, so well
that King Clovis conceived a great affection for him, and got St.-Remi
to make him bishop, first of Arras, and then of Cambrai.

At the time of the Revolution the great abbey near Arras, which bore his
name, was one of the richest of the religious communities which,
according to the very important _Avis aux deputes des trois ordres de la
province d'Artois_, so thoroughly and instructively analysed by M.
Baudrillart, held among them in 1789 two-thirds of the