'That journal, Monsieur?' he replied with a kind of 'sniff': 'that leaf? It is a cabbage-leaf, Monsieur!' 'C'est une feuille de choux!' As for himself he was a Republican--no, not a Boulangist--but he had voted for Boulanger, and he would vote for him again. There must be an end of all those taxes. It was too strong. The land could not pay them. In his country a farm worth 30,000 francs eight years ago, to-day would not sell for 20,000 francs. The farms that were mortgaged would not pay the amount of the mortgages. Look at the taxes on cattle! These free-traders at Paris want to drive us out of our markets with meat on the hoof, and killed meat, from all the ends of the world. Here they are trying to patch up that treaty of commerce with Italy, and bring back all those competing cattle from Sardinia. That's a pretty idea! and for those Italians, who owe France everything and now lick the boots of M. de Bismarck. And now the Paris Chamber of Commerce wants an International Congress on treaties of commerce. The devil take the treaties of commerce!' At the station of La Fere I found waiting for me, one lovely morning in July, the _coupe_ of M. Henrivaux, the director of the famous and historical glassworks of St.-Gobain. When Arthur Young visited these works in 1787, he found them turning out, in the midst of extensive forests, 'the largest mirrors in the world.' The forests are less extensive now, but St.-Gobain still turns out the largest mirrors in the world. To this year's Exposition in Paris it has sent the most gigantic mirror ever made, showing a surface of 31.28 metres; and the glory of St.-Gobain is nightly proclaimed to the world at Paris by the electric light which, from the summit of the Eiffel Tower, flashes out over the great city and the valley of the Seine an auroral splendour of far-darting rays, thanks to St.-Gobain and to the largest lens ever made by man. St.-Gobain, however, has other claims upon attention than its unquestioned rank as the most important seat of one of the most characteristic and important manufactures of our modern civilisation. In a most interesting paper upon the life and labours of M. Augustin Cochin, one of the most useful as well as one of the most distinguished of the many useful and distinguished Frenchmen whose names are associated with this great industry, M. de Falloux describes the works of St.-Gobain as 'an industrial flower upon a seignorial stalk springing from a feudal root.' The description is both terse and pregnant. The history of this great and flourishing industry, stretching back now over two centuries and a half, is a history of evolution without revolution.