man, and to shut
out every glimpse of sun or moon. The flying flakes are in the air.
Every breath draws them in; every moment leaves its deposit on wall and
floor and person. The neatest and most determined fighter of dirt must
still be bond slave to its power; and eating and drinking and breathing
soot all day and every day, there comes at last an acquiescence in the
consequences, and only an instinctive battle with the outward effects.

For the average worker, at the needle at least, wages are too low to
admit of much soap; hot water is equally a luxury, and time if taken
means just so much less of the scanty pay; and thus it happens that
London poverty takes on a hopelessly grimy character, and that the
visitor in the house of the workers learns to wear a uniform which shows
as little as possible of the results of rising up and sitting down in
the soot, which, if less evident in the home of the millionnaire, works
its will no less surely.

Fresh from such experience, and with the memory of home and work room,
manufactory or great shop, all alike sombre and depressing, the
cleanliness of Paris, enforced by countless municipal regulations, is at
first a constant surprise. The French workwoman, even of the lowest
order, shares in the national characteristic which demands a fair
exterior whatever may be the interior condition, and she shares also in
the thrift which is equally a national possession, and the exercise of
which has freed France from the largest portion of her enormous debt.
The English workwoman of the lowest order, the trouser-stitcher or
bag-maker, is not only worn and haggard to the eye, but wears a uniform
of ancient bonnet and shawl, both of which represent the extremity of
dejection. She clings to this bonnet as the type and suggestion of
respectability and to the shawl no less; but the first has reached a
point wherein it is not only grotesque but pitiful, the remnants of
flowers and ribbons and any shadowy hint of ornamentation having long
ago yielded to weather and age and other agents of destruction. The
shawl or cloak is no less abject and forlorn, both being the badge of a
condition from which emergence has become practically impossible. These
lank figures carry no charm of womanhood,--nothing that can draw from
sweater or general employer more than a sneer at the quality of the
labor of those waiting always in numbers far beyond any real demand,
until for both the adjective comes to be "superf