boxes in, and serve as well as a hanging-clothes closet, plenty of water, and excellent sanitary arrangements may be had in an enviable spot, with pleasant outlook and good entrance, for six hundred francs a year (£24); a _femme de ménage_ who will cook, market, mend, and clean up as a French woman knows how, for six sous (threepence) an hour; and if you treat her fairly well and secure her loyalty, she will give you devotion and friendship, as well as excellent service and amazingly intelligent speech. For here you need never be at the expense or trouble of cooking complicated dishes. These are sold at the pastry-cook’s or the baker’s for considerably less than they will cost you at home; so that you can live well and keep your household bills within your means, even if meat in Paris be dear. And then, when you want amusement, should your income not permit of frequent theatre-going what need to open your purse? You have but to open your house door, and emerge upon the public Place. On a summer afternoon or evening a ride on the top of an omnibus or tram is better entertainment than that offered by many a theatre in London. A walk through old Paris, or along the ever lovely quays, is refreshment enough for eye and fancy. Three sous will take you from the Madeleine to the Bastille; and where is it you may not go from the Bastille for another three sous? If the chestnuts are in bloom, on foot, or on the _impériale_ of a public vehicle, in imagination you are wandering through your own avenues; and you really have little envy for the rich in their cushioned victorias. This is why I contend that the philosopher of either sex, whose purse is light and whose tastes are frugal, can make shift with less in Paris than elsewhere; can live and be infinitely happier there on small means than in London. So much beauty is provided for him gratis, that he must be a churl who can spend his time in moaning and whining because his private walls are undecorated, or costly carpets do not cover his floors. Let him go to the Louvre or Cluny Museum when the fit takes him, and count himself a king without the cost and care of sovereignty. Let him sit in the Tuileries, and call them his private gardens while he feeds the sparrows; let him loaf among the book-stalls of the Seine, and leisurely turn the pages of books he means not to buy. Where will he better such luxuries, even at his own price, if fortune stepped his way? In London, poverty is galling because there is no escape from its meannesses and its miseries. That is why the poor in London may be pardoned for taking to drink. That seems the only door, for it would need that a poor man living in a London slum should be very drunk indeed to find beauty of any kind in his environment. But poverty in Paris may be found both amusing and instructive. I am not sure that it is not the poor, the needy, the small clerk, the overworked teacher, the shop-girl, the underfed student, who do not get the best of Paris; feel