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quarters, indeed. The family of the concierge, or doorkeeper, makes the fifth. Their door opens upon the carriage entrance, by which also we come in. The concierge has three children,-one of them away at nurse; the vegetable merchant has two, and the other three families, I hear, have none. Above these shops the building has four floors, and there is a family on each; that on the fourth floor has one child; the rest have none. This building is the one facing the street. Now enter the carriage-way, passing under and through the house just described, and find yourselves in the court-yard and in face of another great house, the front of which forms the back wall of the yard. This house is of brick, somewhat ornamented with sculptures in stone. Once the brick was red and black; now it is dingy. The ornaments are busts in figure and busts in bas-relief and stone facings, which give it an air of nobility, or of having belonged to an old family. This building has carriage-houses on the ground floor, instead of shops,-four of them, with great dark doors: they are called remises. Above the carriage-houses the house has three floors, occupied by three families and a widow. One of these families has two young ladies, and these are all the children in the house. I learn these particulars from another. I rarely or never see these persons; once I called on one of them on business. The widow in this house seems to be a rich lady, with horses, carriages, and servants, of whom I shall speak. The smaller building, in which I am lodged, may be said to stand between these two, on a third side of the courtyard. It has two stables on the ground floor, and three floors above. On the first is the coachman whose wife is a cook; they have no children. On the next floor is my lodging; and here also is another coachman, he and his wife having one child, which is still in the country, for it

is yet the custom to put young children into the country with a nurse who suckles them, because the air is better. The little one of the concierge's wife will probably return between the age of two and three years. She says that she is entirely too crowded for a cradle; the child is about seventy French leagues from Paris, and the cost of keeping it there is from twenty-two to thirty francs a month; in the neighborhood of Paris it would be forty to fifty. As for the rich, she says that there are some who suckle their own children, but many employ a nurse in the house.

To return to our court-yard; nearly all the windows of the great house with the stone trimmings are furnished with outside blinds, like our parlor-blinds which draw up, such as were formerly much used in Philadelphia; but why are these hung upon the outside of the windows? There are plants in some windows, not so handsome as the rhododendrons at the Exposition. The fourth side of our court-yard is formed by the back of a high house upon another street. This high house has a little bit of backyard, separated from our court-yard by a high wall. There are six or seven floors in that house. In one window is a bird-cage; and canaries, too, are in our court, and we have music. I stand at my window and rest my note-book upon the strong grating, which protects one from falling out when the windows are opened like folding-doors, opening in the middle, as so many, if not all, of the Paris windows do.

Once the coachman shows me the horses and the carriages. There are three horses and three carriages, which belong to the lone lady, the widow who has five men-servants. It is very neat in the stables; the horses have plenty of clean straw. When the coachman goes out to drive he is in mourning, and I notice one of his horses

with crape at the ears. Every three days the manure merchant comes to buy the manure, which is piled up in a separate place from the stable. I say to the coachman that it is very neat, and he says that it ought to be, it is so small. I see the merchant come in with his load in a large cart or wagon. While he is loading this, he seems to separate the strawy part and roll it up with his fork and place it around the edges, as a barrier to keep the finer from escaping. Now the load is so high that it is good throwing. He takes a ladder and mounts, and arranges his load carefully. He does not mean to lose any. Does it help to make that great asparagus of Argenteuil, which I see for sale? After he is gone one of the men-servants goes over to a fountain or hydrant in the yard and draws great buckets of water, and with a broom of twigs cleans up the small amount that the merchant has left. The water runs down the stone gutter in the pavement, and disappears in a little hole under an iron shelter. In one corner of the courtyard sits a woman in a cap carding wool for mattresses. It is spring, and a suitable time for cleaning house. They can open the mattresses, card the wool, and put them together again. The wife of the concierge says that the wool is mixed with hair. This, probably, is a woman who goes around to do these jobs. I look down, too, at the little, little kitchen of the concierge. They have a small room and this bit of kitchen. How beautifully clear is the glass of the lantern set up high over his door to light the court-yard. One night when I came in near midnight, I rang the bell, and the outside door seemed to open without hands, or as if the concierge in his room had a rope to pull it. It seemed that his wife had gone to bed in that built-in place, or great bunk in the side of the room, and the curtains were partly drawn. I do not envy the person who sleeps be

hind. A beggar-woman is in the court-yard, to-day, chanting almost like a priest. Afterwards there are two, a woman singing, a man sometimes accompanying. Then she speaks, and I catch the word "charitable." Sometimes the money can be heard that is thrown from windows. Upon the street, beggars are very rarely seen, except the blind, and in a court-yard where I afterwards live, beggars are not allowed until after the proprietor has gone away in the summer. To return to the lone lady upon the former court-yard :—what can she want with three carriages and three horses and five waiting-men, and how many women? How do such people pass their time? She is said to be sixty. The concierge tells me that the master and the coachman of the other carriage-house have gone to be soldiers for fifteen days in the territorial army; they have gone to make the exercise or to train. The master is a

young man; he does not live on our court-yard, he rents this remise. If there should be a war, he and his man will have to go.

At a branch of a well-known American house, the cashier tells me that they are not sufficiently advanced here to have bank-books, but they give check-books. He says that in France separate receipts are given for all deposits, which is much more troublesome to the clerk than to have a bank-book in which to enter the deposit. Here in Paris, when checks are presented at a bank, they are always paid in cash, but in America and England bankers can pay with checks on other banks where they keep deposits, which is a great deal safer and more convenient. receive at the bank a note of five hundred franes, which I feel inclined to ridicule for its blue impression on such common-looking white paper. The gold coins here are

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elegant, and the silver are well enough, but the big copper pieces of two sous are as ugly as the English penny.

I sit down with my note-book at a little table before a restaurant and ask a young man for water and a small glass of wine. He replies that they do not sell less than a bottle. Then I ask for ice-water.

"With sugar?" he inquires.

"No; only ice-water."

"One does not ask for water," he replies.

"Can I not have ice-water if I pay for it?" but he answers not. Stupid that I am! could I not have taken the sugar?

I am often in the vicinity of the Madeleine church. The sculpture at the top, in what I may call one of the gable-ends, represents the passage,-"Then shall the King say to those on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father and to those on his left, Depart from me, ye cursed." Over the church-door is conspicuously visible the legend, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." While writing this about the church, I occupy a chair on the Place Madeleine, or open space near the great church, and a woman comes up, whom I understand to say, "One sou for the chair;" but when I hand it, she says, "Ten centimes." When I give the two sous, she hands me a bit of paper, upon which I read, "Seats of the Promenades of Paris, Chair Of, 10 c." If I had taken a seat upon the bench near by, there would have been no charge.

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