Adieu, beautiful city! _Gallula Roma_ of the ancients! How different had been the fate of all our western world if Constantine had realised his dream, making of Arles the centre of the Roman empire! HOW THE POOR LIVED IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY HOW THE POOR LIVED IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY I During the Middle Ages the country was inhabited, much as it is to-day, by three distinct classes of persons--the nobles, the yeomanry, and peasants; classes distinct but capable of interfusion. Then as now many a noble, impoverished by warfare or mismanagement, sold the fattest acres of his lands to the wealthy merchant from the county town.[3] Then as now many a frugal shepherd laid by a penny here, a farthing there, till, with the trifling profits of his wage, he bought a plot of ground, a barn, a cabin; continuing meanwhile his earlier service; until his repeated and accumulated savings, enriched by the harvests of his rood of land, were sufficient to purchase a little farm.[4] Then as now the son of many such a peasant farmer, migrating to the town, became a wealthy merchant,[5] a man who lived in greater luxury and spent with greater profusion than the nobles, and who, on account of the services he could render them, in an age conspicuous for its lack of ready money, mixed with them almost on equal terms. Finally, in those, as in these days, the King knighted[6] many and many an eminent citizen, endowed him with an escutcheon, and married his sons into the oldest families of France. Thus the burgher class was a sort of omnibus by which the serf jolted on through several generations, towards the peerage; only, the journey being long, and demanding not merely talent and perseverance, but rare qualities of endurance, it was undertaken with success only by exceptional persons. These exceptional persons are beyond the narrow limits of this paper: some other time, perhaps, we may examine the interesting question of the transition from class to class at the end of the Middle Ages; but to-day our business is with the humbler rural folk, the yeoman farmer, the tenant on the estate, the day labourer. What were the wages they earned and the pence they saved? What was the food they ate and the raiment they wore? The schools they sent their children to, and the drugs they brewed for themselves or bought in time of sickness? In examining this, we examine the sum of continuous inglorious effort which, in a time of unexampled disaster, helped France to bear up against an untoward fate, and sent her down to future ages, prosperous and free.