Experience in travelling had taught me that the wearing of shoes is a pretty accurate indication of civilization. The fact that in a large part of southern Europe women who come from the country districts have not yet reached the point where they feel comfortable in shoes is an indication of the backwardness of the people. What interested and surprised me more than the increasing absence of shoes among the countrywomen was the increasing number of women whom I saw engaged in rough and unskilled labour of every kind. I had never seen Negro women doing the sort of work I saw the women of southern Europe doing. When I reached Prague, for example, I noticed a load of coal going through the streets. A man was driving it, but women were standing up behind with shovels. I learned then that it was the custom to employ women to load and unload the coal and carry it into the houses. The driving and the shovelling were done by the man, but the dirtiest and the hardest part of the work was performed by the women. In Vienna I saw hundreds of women at work as helpers in the construction of buildings; they mixed the mortar, loaded it in tubs, placed it on their heads, and carried it up two or three stories to men at work on the walls. The women who engage in this sort of labour wear little round mats on their heads, which support the burdens which they carry. Some of these women are still young, simply grown girls, fresh from the country, but the majority of them looked like old women. Not infrequently I ran across women hauling carts through the streets. Sometimes there would be a dog harnessed to the cart beside them. That, for example, is the way in which the countrywomen sometimes bring their garden truck to market. More often, however, they will be seen bringing their garden products to market in big baskets on their heads or swung over their shoulders. I remember, while I was in Budapest, that, in returning to my hotel rather late one night, I passed through an open square near the market, where there were hundreds of these market women asleep on the sidewalks or in the street. Some of them had thrown down a truss of straw on the pavement under their wagons and gone to sleep there. Others, who had brought their produce into town from the country on their backs, had in many cases merely put their baskets on the sidewalk, lain down, thrown a portion of their skirts up over their heads, and gone to sleep. At this hour the city was still wide awake. From a nearby beer hall there came the sounds of music and occasional shouts of laughter. Meanwhile people were passing and repassing in the street and on the sidewalk, but they paid no more attention to these sleeping women than they would if they had been horses or cows.