It does not seem to have occurred to the author of this interesting exposé, or to his interlocutor, that there was a very simple and well-known remedy for this idiotic and extravagant mode of living,--the dinner-pail. The contractor cited to his friend the case of the masons from the provinces, the Creusois and the Limousins, who are enabled to save money by leaving their families in the country, and that of the London workman who commences his day's labor at nine o'clock in the morning and who ends it at five,--but without any interruption. "At one o'clock in the afternoon he breaks a piece of bread, which he generally brings in his work-bag; and at six o'clock, thanks to the 'Metropolitan,' he is again with his family, comfortably seated at table." The workman's dinner-pail, or its equivalent, is not altogether unknown to the Parisian _ouvrier_, and picturesque groups may sometimes be seen, sometimes with the wife's presence to cheer and adorn, eating and drinking comfortably _al fresco_, on the sidewalks, or on the steps of some monument. To the sojourner in the land, the facts appear to be that the workmen frequent the _gargotes_ much more to drink than to eat, that they spend a very important fraction of the day congregated around, or in, the cheap wine-shops of the neighborhood, and that they consume a highly unnecessary quantity of variously and fearfully colored cheap combinations of _alcool_. In the strike referred to, the _terrassiers_, or diggers, who commenced it, had enough influence in the Conseil Municipal of Paris to get the increased wages for which they quit work, awarded them; but the other workmen, who struck for the cause of _solidarité_, were unsuccessful, and the great strike of all the railway employés throughout the nation, ostentatiously ordered by the _Syndicat Guérard_, and promptly met by the military occupation of all the stations and points of danger, was a complete failure. [Illustration] End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1, by William Walton