not nomads addicted to wandering off into other regions, but
rather a kind of Northern lazzaroni. They do a little work occasionally,
but as little and as seldom as possible. They are inveterate poachers,
and the more industrious of them are habitual smugglers. In their way of
prosecuting this industry, however, they show their fine natural
instinct for avoiding labour. The most profitable trade they drive is in
tobacco. This they get over the frontier from Belgium, and to get it
they train a certain breed of dogs. They tie parcels of tobacco around
the throats of these dogs, and then proceed to have the dogs well
thrashed by one of their number dressed in the Custom-house uniform. A
few lessons of this sort suffice to develop in the dogs a strong
association of ideas between the odour of tobacco and the thwacks of a
cudgel, and a dog well educated in this way may be trusted, after he has
got his cargo in Belgium, to reach his master's den unvisited by the
French _douane_. Baudrillart confirms this account. He puts the number
of habitual applicants, largely from this mendicant class, for public
relief in the department at from two hundred to two hundred and fifty
thousand a year. Out of the 662 communes in the department there were
only twenty in 1888 without a 'Bureau de Bienfaisance,' and the
department spends five millions of francs a year on its charities,
independently of nearly twice that amount expended upon hospitals,
asylums, dispensaries, and the like, by private benevolence. Under the
French law, private donors can found charities to be attached to the
public 'Bureau de Bienfaisance,' and administered by the public
officers, and one of the many evil effects of the war declared against
Catholic France by the Third Republic is that it affects such charities
very seriously.

Even under the Empire trouble came of the occasional division of one
commune into two or more communes, a question then arising as, for
example, in a famous case of the communes of St.-Joseph and St.-Martin
in the Loire, about the division between the poor of the two communes of
three hospital beds left to the 'Bureau de Bienfaisance' of the original
commune of St.-Martin. It was easier for the military saint himself to
divide his cloak with the shivering beggar than for the commune which
bore his name to divide three beds into two equal portions! At Lille,
two or three years ago, a lady, Mme. Austin Laurand, the widow of M.
Laurand, in acco