This hard-working race is not without its amusements. It must, as I have said, have its share of the joys of life. They are never too tired after a day’s work to dance to the music and measure of song, which they love; and whenever you chance upon them congregated for diversion, whether at a fair, on a moonlit sward, over a hilarious meal, you will always find their behaviour seemly and their gaiety attractive and measured. If the feathers and hats of holiday trim of Great Britain are lacking here, so also are the repulsive giggles and the hateful love-making of those latitudes. The French, we know, are not patterns of virtue, but they certainly are patterns of deportment abroad. In that clever little book, _The Island_, Mr. Whiteing depicts the love-making of this class in England as certainly the worst enemy of the French could never write with any semblance of truth of the same portion of the race in France. “Like their North-American sisters, fond of feathers and bright hues. No gaudier thing in nature than the coster-girl in her holiday dress of mauve, with the cruel plume that seems to have been dyed in blood. Relation of female to male, singular survival of primitive state. Love-making always, in form at least, an abduction of the virgin. A meeting at the street corner in the dusk for the beginning of the ceremony; then a chase round the houses, the heavy boots after the light ones, with joyous shrieks to mark the line of flight; after that the seizure, the fight, with sounding slaps for dalliance that might knock the wind out of a farrier of the Blues. In the final clutch skirts part in screeching rents, feathers strew the ground. Then the panting pair return hand in hand to the street corner, to begin again.” Of the meeting of these dreadful lovers later in the public-house Mr. Whiteing adds—and here, too, he paints a picture exclusively British, that never could be seen in France: “Nightfall brings them together at the universal rendezvous from every near or distant scene; men and those that were once maidens, mumbling age and swearing infancy, stand six deep before the slimy bar, till the ever-flowing liquor damps down their fiercest fires, and the great city is once more at rest. The imagination of him that saw hell could hardly picture the final scene.” And yet you will read such things printed of the French not immediately under your inspection that make you ask yourself if the rowdy love-making and public-house bars constitute the worst possible degradation of humanity. The most obvious, the most offensive assuredly, but not the least innocent. M. Octave Mirbeau has recently done me the honour to send me his latest book, _Le Journal d’une Femme de Chambre_. Not even Zola could conceive a more terrible indictment against his own race. All classes are therein depicted as equally corrupt, shameless, brutalised by irrepressed and irrepressible vice,—nobles, _bourgeoisie_, servants of both sexes,