The Mont-de-Piété is a civil institution, which exists for the benefit of the needy. It is not in the least like our pawn-offices, for here no usury is practised, and the town benefits by any profits that accrue. The central house is in the Rue des Blancs-Manteaux, and there are four large branch offices. Money is advanced on the objects offered, and when the sum is brought back, interest is charged, and the objects are restored. If no claim is put in at the end of eighteen months, the objects are sold, and the profits are handed over to the _Assistance Publique_. All classes of society in straitened circumstances have recourse to the Mont-de-Piété which is a most useful institution. Turn now to the latest public edifice for the poor under the Third Republic. The late Baroness de Hirsch, a Jewess, was one of the several founders—all of them women—of this splendid hospital, attached to the Pasteur Institute. Here each patient has a room to himself free on the raised ground-floor or on the story above. Below there are bath-rooms and douches; there is a workshop for the carding of mattresses, each patient sleeping on a new mattress, each mattress passing through an immense steriliser. To improve upon the old method, by which doctors and surgeons visit the patient at stated hours, a private house of handsome dimensions has been built expressly for the doctor, who must be always on the spot. In the case of contagious sickness there is the process of purification in the lower cells, while ordinary cases of illness are, after the _consultation à la hâte_, despatched to one of the bright, clean, little sick rooms on the ground-floor. Here the rooms are divided by glass partitions, which are muffed or not, as may be required. Grown patients are more likely to wish for the privacy of muffed-glass panels, whereas it is preferable that the panels should be transparent when the patients are children and need constant supervision. During convalescence, the patients, weary of solitude, can seek change by transportation to a public ward, and there is a long glass gallery, or winter garden, well located, and gay with green seats and tables, where they can walk up and down, and receive their friends among the palms and India-rubber trees. This part of the establishment has more the air of a convalescent home than a public hospital. As deaths may occur even in the best regulated hospitals, there is a subterranean passage constructed for the _service des morts_, by which means the living are spared all contact with lugubrious eventualities. M. Duclaux calculates that the yearly expenditure of this admirable institution will reach £20,000. Let us hope that those who profit by this foundation will prove not destitute of good feeling towards those who have spent so much time, labour, money, science, and thought on their behalf. But, alas! the poor are essentially mistrustful of public charities. I know not why, but it is, nevertheless,