A certain proportion of the workmen employed in the mines prefer to live in the town; but it is the policy of the company to encourage the development of cottage life, and wherever I went throughout its extensive domain I found families of the workmen installed in comfortable homes, surrounded by gardens and by what are called in England 'allotments.' Of these the company now owns no fewer than 2,628. Originally these houses were built in the form of _cites ouvrieres_; but it has been found by experience that these blocks of contiguous houses are open to certain objections from the point of view of health, as well as from the point of view of morals, and the more recent constructions are detached cottages. A model of one of these cottages was exhibited in the social economy section of the Exposition at Paris this year, But it was more satisfactory to see them actually inhabited and on the spot. Each cottage is built in a field of land of two acres in extent, and the rent varies from three francs and a half to six francs a month. For the lesser sum, or for forty-two francs a year, a workman at Anzin earning an average wage of three francs a day, or in round numbers a thousand francs a year, may thus secure a well-built house--most of those I saw were of brick--with proper drainage and cellarage, containing two good rooms on each of three floors, with closets, and standing in its own grounds. Compare this, not with the squalid and noisome single rooms for which in the worst parts of Spitalfields a rent of tenpence a day, or five shillings a week (Sunday being thrown in free when the weekly rent is duly paid), or thirteen pounds sterling a year is exacted--but with the average rental of lodgings in the manufacturing towns of Massachusetts! But this is not all. Whatever repairs are needed in these houses are made, not by the tenants, but by the company, and the company further leases to its workmen, who choose to avail themselves of them, at very low rates garden sites within each commune, for cultivation as kitchen-gardens. No fewer than 2,500 families now have such holdings under cultivation, making a total of 205 hectares thus put to profit by the workmen, who take a lively pleasure in cultivating them during their leisure hours.