At Thiers the church, which is a large one, fronting on an extensive Place Publique, was very handsomely decorated on Corpus Christi Sunday by the people of the commune. Flags and garlands were put up, too, all about the Place Publique. The Anzin Company are now building a large school for girls very near this church; and I visited, with M. Guary, one afternoon, the boys' school at Thiers. It is very well installed in a large building, with a playground and a gymnasium roofed in, but not walled. The teacher--a lay teacher, and a very quiet, sensible man--who lives in the school-building with his wife, told me he preferred to keep it thus, and the boys liked it better. They were at their lessons when I visited the school, and a very sturdy, comely lot of lads they were. Some of them were _en penitence_, having slighted their lessons, as the teacher slily intimated, by reason of the great Church festival. This I thought not unlikely, and he did not appear to regard it as an absolutely unpardonable offence, while the juvenile criminals themselves were evidently quite cheery in their minds. In a room near the gymnasium were racks filled with wooden guns. These the teachers pointed out with pride. They were a gift from the company to his battalion of boys, who delighted in their regular military drill. He thought them, after only eighteen months' training, one of the best boy-battalions in the department, and would have liked to take them to Paris to compete for the athletic prizes. But to take up even a picked company of ten would have cost 400 francs, which he thought, and I agreed with him, might be better spent in Thiers. 'And then,' he said with a smile, 'what a life I should have led in Paris, with those ten boys to look after!' The Anzin Company used to spend 80,000 francs a year on keeping up its own schools. But it is so heavily taxed for the 'school palaces' which have been put up, and for the public schools, that it has materially reduced this outlay, though it still expends a large sum in various ways for the advantage of the children of its own workmen attending the public schools; and still keeps up certain religious schools, especially for the little children and the girls. One of these schools for little children which I visited at St.-Waast, kept by the Sisters, was a model. The little creatures, ranged in categories according to their years, were pictures of health and good humour, as they sate in rows at their little desks, or marched about, singing in choruses. One exercise, through which a number of them, from six to eight years old, were conducted by two of the Sisters, might have been studied from a fresco by Fra Angelico representing the heavenly choirs, and gave the most intense delight evidently to the singing children as well as to the smiling and kindly Sisters. There is a large church, too, at St.-Waast and a _cite ouvriere_.