The custom of washing clothes in rivulets or pools leads to some difficulties in the profession of the _blanchisseuse_. It cannot be easy to wash when there is no water possessing washable qualities. Cheerful in this as in everything else, the women of Mentone are exemplary in making the best of things. They will wash clothes in a dub which a dog would not drink out of. Kneeling in a kind of basket, to keep their knees from the stones, and using square lumps of white soap streaked with green, like old Stilton cheese, they cluster in groups around pools in the Borigo or Carei, and there carry on their operations. The pools which have settled among the rubbish of the Carei, dirty and offensive though they be, are the recognised washing-tubs of the town. Around one favourite gutter, I one day reckoned as many as fifty-two washerwomen, all kneeling as close to each other as possible, and all using the same opaque frothy liquid. The sight of these bands of kneeling figures at the outlet of the Carei, where a pool accumulates, after having served the like purpose farther up the bed of rubbish, is about as extraordinary as can be witnessed. How clothes can be cleansed by washing in such puddles is somewhat incomprehensible. Persons knowing on the subject ascribe all to the force of soap, and the detergent power of fine air and sunshine in drying. The explanation is not very satisfactory. In this as in other toilsome occupations, the women of Mentone exhibit a spirit of ceaseless and uncomplaining industry. Be the weather cold or hot, there they are at their work. When frost put a film of ice on the pools, they still continued their labours. Poor as the females evidently are, they shew uncommon skill in the patching and mending of clothes. The needle must be in frequent requisition, for nowhere is there to be seen a ragged garment on man or woman. It does not detract from the ingenuity of the needlewomen to say that, in patching, they do not concern themselves greatly as to harmony of colour. A light patch on a dark ground, or dark on a light ground, red upon blue, or any other incongruity as it may happen, answers every required purpose. A square patch of bright green on the back of a fisherman’s gray jacket, shews a fine indifference to public opinion, and is rather amusing than otherwise. The grand thing evidently is to overcome raggedness, no matter about colour, and the design is fully realised. By the mending process, garments of all sorts, masculine or feminine, are spun out to a respectable longevity—that is to say, as long as they will hold decently together. This thriftiness, I think, speaks well for the character of the humbler classes. There is poverty, but no squalor. The only unpleasing feature is street-begging. In all quarters we were beset by mendicants. Public begging is doubtless forbidden, but where there is no comprehensive method of succouring the necessitous, and no proper