the variety and tastefulness of the diet of the village, but enables Madame Beaugard to earn her living more amply. In another big operation of housekeeping the simplest French country community puts its resources together, instead of scattering them. On wash days there is no arduous lifting and emptying out of water, no penetrating odor of soapsuds throughout all the house, no waste of fuel under hundreds of individual wash-boilers, no solitary drudging over the washtubs. The French country housekeeper who does her own washing brings around to the street door her faithful steed, the wheelbarrow, and loads it up; first the big galvanized boiler full of soiled clothes, then a wooden box open at one side, filled with clean straw, then the soap, a flat, short-handled wooden paddle, and a stiff scrubbing-brush. Leaving the children not yet at school in the charge of a neighbor--for whom she will perform the same service another day of the week--her head done up in a kerchief, her skirts kilted high to let her step free, she sets off down the road for the _lavoir_. I use the French word because the institution does not exist in English. This is usually a low stone building, with an open place in the roof, either covered with glass or open to the air. In the center is a big pool of water, constantly renewed, which gushes in clean and eddies out soapy, carrying with it the impurities of the village linen. Here our housewife finds an assortment of her friends and neighbors, and here she kneels in the open air, in her straw-filled box, and soaps, and beats, and rinses, and scrubs at the spots with her scrubbing-brush (they never use a rubbing-board), and at the same time hears all the talk of the town, gets whatever news from the outer world is going the rounds, jokes and scolds, sympathizes and laughs, sorrows with and quarrels with her neighbors,--gets, in short, the same refreshing and entire change from the inevitable monotony of the home routine which an American housewife of a more prosperous class gets in her club meeting, and which the American housewife of the same class gets, alas! almost never. And, yes, the clothes are clean! I know it runs counter to all our fixed ideas and what we are taught in domestic-science classes. I don't pretend to explain it but the fact remains that clothes soaped and beaten and rinsed in cold water, boiled in a boiler over the open fire and dried on the grass, are of the most dazzling whiteness. It is just another wholesome reminder that there are all kinds of ways to kill a cat, and that our own, natural and inevitable as it seems to us, may not even be the most orthodox.