, bending under the burden of an enormous sack of _charbon a
terre_, but smiling as she puts it down. She is mistress of a little
shop just round the corner, and she keeps the accounts of the wood and
coal bought by her patrons by a system best known to herself, her
earnings hardly going beyond three francs a day. Even she, black with
the coal-dust which she wastes no time in scrubbing off save on Sundays
when she too makes one of the throng in the boulevards, faces the hard
labor with light-hearted confidence, and plans to save a sou here and
there for the _dot_ of the baby who shares in the distribution of
coal-dust, and will presently trot by her side as assistant.

In the laundry just beyond, the women are singing or chattering, the
voices rising in that sudden fury of words which comes upon this people,
and makes the foreigner certain that bloodshed is near, but which ebbs
instantly and peacefully, to rise again on due occasion. Long hours,
exhausting labor, small wages, make no difference. The best worker
counts from three to four francs daily as prosperity, and the rate has
even fallen below this; yet they make no complaint, quite content with
the sense of companionship, and with the satisfaction of making each
article as perfect a specimen of skill as can be produced.

Here lies a difference deeper than that of temperament,--the fact that
the French worker finds pleasure in the work itself, and counts its
satisfactory appearance as a portion of the reward. Slop work, with its
demand for speedy turning out of as many specimens of the poorest order
per day as the hours will allow, is repugnant to every instinct of the
French workwoman; and thus it happens that even slop work on this side
of the Channel holds some hint of ornamentation and the desire to lift
it out of the depth to which it has fallen. But it is gaining ground,
fierce competition producing this effect everywhere; and the always
lessening ratio of wages which attends its production, must in time
bring about the same disastrous results here as elsewhere, unless the
tide is arrested, and some form of co-operative production takes its
place. With the French worker in the higher forms of needle industry we
shall deal in the next chapter, finding what differences are to be met
here also between French and English methods.

CHAPTER XV.

FRENCH BARGAIN COUNTERS.

"Yes, it is the great shops that have done that, madame. Once, you saw
what was on