The operation commences in the gutter at the bin in which the householder has dumped his refuse and which he has moved to the kerbstone for collection. Now the Frenchman is a cute bargainer, as the whole world knows, and the concierge, after the passing of the ordinance compelling the householder to bin his refuse, promptly saw a means to improve his pocket. The bin was a lucky dip and accordingly was well worth exploiting as a concession. He promptly drove a bargain with one class of the vast army of Paris waste-gatherers which entitled the individual to rummage the bin before the collector came along, the only requirement being that the “miner” should be up early and on the spot before the refuse carts commenced operations. The _placier_, as this individual is called, did his work well--the bin contained little of material value after he had sorted its contents. But other less luckless members of the garbage-rummaging fraternity did not spurn to submit the tailings from the first process to another treatment and reap a harvest in the process. The odds and ends gathered in this manner, and which were of a most diversified nature, for the most part found their way to Monsieur Verdier-Dufour’s establishment, where the precise value of each article, and the grade of each range of substances, became known to the uttermost centime. Nothing was too small to be examined and each article had its individual bin. The man at the helm knew the exact application for each article, while he was a master-mind in following the markets. When quotations were abnormally low he could hold on for the return of better times. His waste commanded the admiration of the firms with which he dealt because he maintained the standard of his products which were exactly as described. Manufacturers merely had to dump the waste into their machines, thus treating it as if it were raw material. There was no interference with the rigid routine of their business, nor were they called upon to expend a further penny in rendering the waste suitable for their intentions. So the master-mind built up a large and highly lucrative business and thus there was very little household waste which escaped reclamation. Co-operative societies among the rag-pickers supplemented individual effort in this field. In this instance the process is simpler because it is conducted along broader lines. Sorting is not conducted to such a fine degree as under the individual system above described. Consequently it suffers because lower prices are paid. Waste commands a price according to the time and labour which will have to be expended by the purchaser before such material can be safely turned into the precise channels of the huge manufacturing machine for which it has been acquired.