dry beans which are such a bother to prepare in small quantities and such an admirable and savory food. She is the village fruit-seller, and when you go to buy your fruit in her little shop, which is nothing more or less than her front parlor transformed, you are sure to find something else appetizing and tempting. Note that this regular service not only adds greatly to the variety and tastefulness of the diet of the village, but enables Madame Beaugard to earn her living more amply.

In another big operation of housekeeping the simplest French country community puts its resources together, instead of scattering them. On wash days there is no arduous lifting and emptying out of water, no penetrating odor of soapsuds throughout all the house, no waste of fuel under hundreds of individual wash-boilers, no solitary drudging over the washtubs. The French country housekeeper who does her own washing brings around to the street door her faithful steed, the wheelbarrow, and loads it up; first the big galvanized boiler full of soiled clothes, then a wooden box open at one side, filled with clean straw, then the soap, a flat, short-handled wooden paddle, and a stiff scrubbing-brush. Leaving the children not yet at school in the charge of a neighbor—for whom she will perform the same service another day of the week—her head done up in a kerchief, her skirts kilted high to let her step free, she sets off down the road for the lavoir. I use the French word because the institution does not exist in English.

This is usually a low stone building, with an open place in the roof, either covered with glass or open to the air. In the center is a big pool of water, constantly renewed, which gushes in clean and eddies out soapy, carrying with it the impurities of the village linen. Here our housewife finds an assortment of her friends and neighbors, and here she kneels in the open air, in her straw-filled box, and soaps, and beats, and rinses, and scrubs at the spots with her scrubbing-brush (they never use a rubbing-board), and at the same time hears all the talk of the town, gets whatever news from the outer world is going the rounds, jokes and scolds, sympathizes and laughs, sorrows with and quarrels with her neighbors,—gets, in short, the same refreshing and entire change from the inevitable monotony of the home routine which an American housewife of a more prosperous class gets in her club meeting, and which the American housewife of the same class gets, alas! almost never.

And, yes, the clothes are clean! I know it runs counter to all our fixed ideas and what we are taught in domestic-science classes. I don't pretend to explain it but the fact remains that clothes soaped and beaten and rinsed in cold water, boiled in a boiler over the open fire and dried on the grass, are of the most dazzling whiteness. It is just another wholesome reminder that there are all kinds of ways to kill a cat, and that our own, natural and inevitable as it seems to us, may not even be the most orthodox.

Another such reminder is the fashion in which they manage baths in Crouy. There are not (you can hear, can't you, the supercilious Anglo-Saxon tourist saying, "Of course there are not"?) any bathrooms in the houses, nor in the one little inn. And yet the people take plenty of baths, and in big porcelain bathtubs too, bigger and deeper and fuller of hot water than those we have in our houses.

Among the many curious little industries of the place is the établissement des bains. As you go down the main street of a morning you stop in and fill up a little printed card stating that you wish a hot (or cold) plain (or perfumed or sulphur or starch or what not) bath, at such and such an hour. The little old woman in charge (note that this is another way for a little old woman to earn an honest living) notes your hour, and stokes up her stove according to the schedule of the day. When you arrive you are shown into an immaculately clean tiled bathroom, with an enormous tub, lined with a clean sheet (it has been definitely decided by doctors that this precaution obviates any possibility of contagion) and filled with clear, sparkling hot water. You can rent your towels for two cents apiece, and buy a bit of soap for three cents, or you may bring them from home, if you prefer. Of course, being unused to this particular way of killing the cat, you feel rather foolish and queer to be taking a bath in a community bathtub instead of in your own. But the bath is a fine one; with a cold rub-down at the end, there is no danger of taking cold; and as you dress, glowing and refreshed, you cannot put out of your mind some such colloquy as this:

"Yes, of course I prefer a bathtub in my own house. Everybody would. But suppose I haven't money enough to have one? At home, in a town like this, you can only get a bath, or give it to your children, if you have capital enough to buy, install, and keep up a bathroom of your own. Here you can have an even better one, any time you can spare fifteen cents in cash. Which method produces the bigger area of clean skin in a given community?"

You usually end your colloquy by quoting to yourself, laughingly, the grandly American-minded remark of the boy from Illinois, whose reaction to the various eye-openers about him was thus formulated:

"Do you know, the thing we want to do at home is to keep all the good ways of doing this we've got already, and then add all the French ones too."

We laughed over the youthful self-confidence of that ambition, but, as the boy from Illinois would say, "Honestly, do you know, there is something in it."

In one of the few large, handsome houses in Crouy there is something else I wish we might import into America. Very simply, with no brass band of a formal organization, secretaries, or reports, the younger girls of the town are brought together to learn how to sew and cook and keep their household accounts. The splendid park which looks so lordly with its noble trees is only the playground for the little girls in gingham aprons in the intervals of their study; and the fine, high-ceilinged, spacious old salon, a veritable Henry James room, is employed in anything but a Henry James manner as the workroom where all the children from the poorer houses round about sit in the sunshine, setting beautiful fine stitches and chattering like magpies.

A large room at the side has been fitted up—oh, so long before domestic science "struck" America—as a kitchen, and here the little girls daily prepare their own luncheons, after having, turn by turn, done the marketing and made up their small accounts under the supervision of an expert teacher. Their rosy cheeks and bright eyes testify to the good training which their own mothers received in this very room, in these very essentials of life.

The gracious, gray-haired owner of the beautiful home has always been so busy with her school and workroom that she almost never runs into Paris, although she is not more than a couple of hours away.

"I've only been there five or six times in my life," she says, shaking her head in mocking contrition, and turning superb old rings around on her soft, wrinkled hands. She adds, with a pretty whimsical smile: "To tell the truth, it bores me awfully when I do go. I have so much to see to here, that I'm uneasy to be away."

You are to remember that this has been going on for at least two generations. The quiet-eyed châtelaine of the manor mentions, in passing, that she is but continuing the work of her aunt who lived there before her, and who for fifty years gave all her life and property for her neighbors' children in quite the same way. When you leave you try to murmur something about what two such lives must have meant to the community, but this entirely unmodern, unradical, unread provincial Frenchwoman cuts you short by saying in a matter-of-fact tone, with the most transparent simplicity of manner:

"Oh, but of course property is only a trust, after all, isn't it?"

Will some one please tell me what are the