n my hand, and
with a drawl of supreme and very American contempt, exclaimed, "Well,
you don't look it," and scampered off.

Paris, however, is not all of France. Sometimes I have thought not the
best part of it. There is the south of France, with Avignon, the heart
of Provence, seat of the French papacy six hundred years ago, the
metropolis of Christendom before the Midi was a region--Paris yet a
village, and Rome struggling out of the debris of the ages--with Arles
and Nimes, and, above all, Tarascon, the home of the immortal Tartarin,
for next-door neighbors. They are all hard by Marseilles. But Avignon
ever most caught my fancy, for there the nights seem peopled with the
ghosts of warriors and cardinals, and there on festal mornings the
spirits of Petrarch and his Laura walk abroad, the ramparts, which bade
defiance to Goth and Vandal and Saracen hordes, now giving shelter to
bats and owls, but the atmosphere laden with legend

_"...tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance and Provencal song and sun-burnt mirth."_

Something too much of this! Let me not yield to the spell of the
picturesque. To recur to matters of fact and get down to prose and the
times we live in let us halt a moment on this southerly journey and
have a look in upon Lyons, the industrial capital of France, which is
directly on the way.

The idiosyncrasy of Lyons is silk. There are two schools of introduction
in the art of silk weaving, one of them free to any lad in the city, the
other requiring a trifle of matriculation. The first of these witnesses
the whole process of fabrication from the reeling of threads to the
finishing of dress goods, and the loom painting of pictures. It is most
interesting of course, the painstaking its most obvious feature, the
individual weaver living with his family upon a wage representing the
cost of the barest necessities of life. Again, and ever and ever again,
the inequalities of fortune! Where will it end?

The world has tried revolution and it has tried anarchy. Always the
survival of the strong, nicknamed by Spencer and his ilk the "fittest."
Ten thousand heads were chopped off during the Terror in France to make
room for whom? Not for the many, but the few; though it must be allowed
that in some ways the conditions were improved.

Yet here after a hundred years, here in Lyons, faithful, intelligent
men struggle for sixty, for forty cents a day, with never a hope beyond!
What is to be done abou