ch the misguided mourners hang over
the remains of their departed. In this municipal columbarium, families
have a right to deposit their ashes for the space of five years, at the
end of which period the urns are taken out and emptied in the fosse
commune. A concession perpetuelle for the urns in a cemetery may,
however, be purchased for the sum of three hundred and sixty-nine francs
and eighty centimes. The columbarium provides for three hundred urns;
less than half these receptacles are as yet filled, but the number of
cremations increases slowly year by year. There is also a similar
establishment in the cemetery at Clichy, and others are projected for
other sites.

Statistics show that the annual mortality in Paris is about 22.6 per
thousand inhabitants, which the Parisian publications erroneously claim
is below the average for large cities. In London, for example, in the
week ending January 14, 1899, it was 18 per thousand, and averaged 18.5
in thirty-two provincial towns. In some of them, as Brighton, Derby,
Leicester, and Hull, it ranged from 11 to 12.9; and the highest rates
were from 22.4 in Manchester to 24 in Sunderland. It is a constant
source of wonder to the newly-arrived in Paris, however,--especially if
he be inoculated with modern ideas concerning sanitary sewage in
dwelling-houses,--that the city escapes an annual epidemic of typhoid
fever. So very primitive are the methods of cesspools, and the official
emptying of them, in very many quarters of the city, that it is an
article of faith with the citizens to close all their windows tightly at
night,--an article of faith that is adopted by many American and English
residents with the usual wholesome Anglo-Saxon ideas concerning
ventilation of sleeping-rooms. It may be stated, however, as the result
of much experience, that--even for those who are able thus to sleep in
tightly-closed rooms--the open windows at night are _not_ deadly. The
prejudice against night air, which is by no means confined to France,
here takes on an acute form,--it is even asserted stoutly, and this,
too, is believed sometimes by the otherwise intelligent foreigner, that
the entrance of fresh air into the sleeping-room at night produces
affections of the eyes. The quarters of Paris in which the mortality is
the lowest--those which show quite white on the graded annual mortality
plan of the city--are the arrondissements of the Elysee and the Opera,
11.1 and 14.5 respectively; and thos