an occasional old woman, with an immense broad-brimmed straw hat on her head and a load of fagots on her back, our carriage might dash at breakneck speed through Panazol without fear of injuring any one. Within a radius of a few miles there are a dozen pleasant points for afternoon drives--Rochechouart, with its historic château; St. Yrieix, a bright and pretty town, with a church that has a history; St. Léonard, with its famous church, an exact model of St. Sepulchre at Jerusalem; the abbaye of Solignac, where St. Éloi worked as a silversmith; and Aix, farther down on the Vienne, where you can drive down for dinner, and then return home along the river-bank by moonlight. Either one of these trips would prove interesting: your gorgeous driver is very communicative, and tells you all about the owners of this place and that, what their family pedigrees are, whom they married, how much they are worth and how much they paid per hectare for the property. There is a fair theatre where one can hear _Le Petit Duc, Les Cloches_ or some other popular opera sung three times a week. One sees very few elaborately-dressed ladies in the audiences, for the city, being an industrial one and with a large majority of its population given to their daily labor for support, is not much wedded to fashion: it is practical rather than worldly. The constant round of dinners, soirées, balls and receptions which characterizes French high life in many and even smaller cities is lacking here. The wealthier people, as a rule, are the porcelain-manufacturers, who live in a quiet, substantial, sensible way, eschewing the follies and fatigues of fashionable existence. Full half of the population depends, directly or indirectly, on the porcelain industry for its support. It was only a hundred and thirty years ago that this industry had its birth. For centuries before that, it is true, Limoges had been famous through all Europe for its enamels. Bernard Palissy was a citizen of Limoges, and Léonard Limousin was appointed "enamel-painter in ordinary" to King Francis I. It is possible that this art was brought here from Italy by some Venetian merchants, who in 977 built up a portion of what is now the Faubourg St. Martial and established an extensive trade in fabrics and spices with the Levant. But it was not until 1765 that Doctor Darnay, a surgeon of Limoges, discovered near the neighboring village of St. Yrieix the inexhaustible quarries of kaolin which were destined to become a source of wealth and employment for all the surrounding population. Like most discoverers, he failed to realize any substantial benefits. A Bordeaux druggist, one De Villaret, managed to secure a patent in advance of him, and poor Darnay, defeated in a suit for damages, had to content himself with the posthumous honor of having a street named after him in the city which has most profited by his discovery.