ment, namely, the various statutes, according to which the Jesuits have no raison d'être on French soil.

Be this as it may, there is the handsome, brand-new building, capable of accommodating 900 students, and built on the very best sanitary principles, a splendid garden being part of its attractiveness. The College was opened on the 15th October, after the long vacation. It is the impression of the present writer that the expulsion of the Jesuits will not take place, at least for a long time to come. Conservative France is too vastly in the majority for any violent measures, however apparently justifiable in the eye of the law.

Dijon is celebrated for three manufactures: its pills, its mustard, and its gingerbread-and the history of each is curious in the extreme. We will take the pills first. Without doubt the people who take most pills will be the first to make them wholesale, and the consumption of machine-made pills throughout the length and breadth of France is enormous. It was a happy thought of a successful French pillmaker who, with the best intentions in the world, could hardly satisfy his customers, to have recourse to machinery. It must have flashed upon him like lightning that the clumsiest machine might turn off three times as many pills in a day as the most dexterous fingers, and now the process is so exact that some hundreds of thousands of pills are fabricated daily on the premises of the original inventor. This gentleman, Thévenot by name, a chemist of Dijon, gained a large fortune by his manufactory, and it is satisfactory to learn that his descendants are doing as prosperous a trade as himself. The hardness of the times in no degree affects the sale of pills. People will have their pet luxury at any cost, and so while they are ready to give up their horses and carriages and toilettes, they retain their pill. I had the opportunity of conversing with several manufacturers in different branches of trade whilst at Dijon, and all complained of the slackness in trade. Only the fortunate fabricator of pills showed a cheerful countenance. Tar, chloroform, camphor, castor-oil, oil of eucalyptus, are amongst the favourite ingredients. The process of pill-making by machinery is extremely rapid and neat. Thin layers, composed of gum, sugar, and gelatine, are spread out in small pieces, the desired oil is then spread on the under layer, just as we put jam in a layer of paste; a second put on, the whole adhering like thin covered pastry. This is now placed between two iron plates indented with little holes the size of the pill, two turns are given to it in what may be called a baking oven, and out come the pills, each separating itself from its envelope, smooth, compact, and hard as shot. In fact, they are like mince-pies in miniature. Any essence indissoluble in water can be manufactured into pills, and of course the economy upon hand labour is very great.

The celebrated Dijon mustard is even more worthy of note as a manufacture. Its peculiar quality is a certain piquancy not found in any other mustard, of which there are deservedly celebrated manufac

wine less than ten or fifteen years old, and I have tasted choice wine of Beaune that has been mellowing much longer still in these private cellars, and of most exquisite bouquet. In fact, I may say, that I never knew what Burgundy wine was like till I tasted it among my wine-growing Burgundian friends. The sour stuff drunk in England -also in many parts of France-under the name of claret, is no more like the real thing than cream-cheese is like the moon. Until my Burgundian experience, indeed, I never could in the least understand English enthusiasm on the subject of French wines, seeing how unpalatable is the usual potion poured out of the claret jug, cold, sour, vinegar-like, anything but calculated to cheer the mind and warm the body.

These famous cellars I speak of are really wonderful, forming in themselves a little subterranean village or town, where you might as easily lose yourself as in the Catacombs. There seems no end to the long, arched chambers, some having on each side huge casks of wine holding fourteen tuns, others having neat shelves where the bottles are placed with as much order as books in a library. The temperature of the cellars varies slightly, the mean being 15° Centigrade, or about 55° Fahrenheit. The greatest curiosity of its contents is some wine of the 1819 vintage. Three thousand and odd tuns of wine are contained in these cellars, which are as interesting to a wine-lover as some famous library to a bibliophile.

We next pass on to two brand-new buildings on a handsome scale at Dijon, worth noticing from different points of view, the first, the Jews' Synagogue, inaugurated during my visit. There are not more than 500 members of the Jewish community here, and this imposing place of worship, erected at a cost of 300,000 francs, must represent large sacrifices on the part of all. As we well know, the Jews in France are less favourably regarded by their Catholic neighbours than Protestants, but this feeling is fortunately on the decline. The French Government contributed 25,000 francs towards this synagogue, whilst the town, with equal liberality, granted the building site. the opening ceremony, in which Protestant pastors took part, a prayer for the French Republic was offered up by the officiating Rabbi, and the inauguration speeches were all marked by sentiments of patriotism and attachment to Republican institutions. Catholics, it is almost needless to say, are in enormous majority here, as in Auvergne; and not far from this handsome place of Jewish worship is the enormous Jesuits' College, equally new and equally imposing, the sight of which opens up a wholly new line of thought. Will the Jesuits be expelled from France or will they not? This is the burning question in France at the present moment- -a question it is much better not to raise in general company, so sore are the feelings of all concerned. On the one hand is sentiment, on the other law. Catholic parents urge that in a Government based on liberty they should be permitted to choose the teachers of their sons; whilst the large political party

ment, namely, the various statutes, according to which the Jesuits have no raison d'être on French soil.

Be this as it may, there is the handsome, brand-new building, capable of accommodating 900 students, and built on the very best sanitary principles, a splendid garden being part of its attractiveness. The College was opened on the 15th October, after the long vacation. It is the impression of the present writer that the expulsion of the Jesuits will not take place, at least for a long time to come. Conservative France is too vastly in the majority for any violent measures, however apparently justifiable in the eye of the law.

Dijon is celebrated for three manufactures: its pills, its mustard, and its gingerbread-and the history of each is curious in the extreme. We will take the pills first. Without doubt the people who take most pills will be the first to make them wholesale, and the consumption of machine-made pills throughout the length and breadth of France is enormous. It was a happy thought of a successful French pillmaker who, with the best intentions in the world, could hardly satisfy his customers, to have recourse to machinery. It must have flashed upon him like lightning that the clumsiest machine might turn off three times as many pills in a day as the most dexterous fingers, and now the process is so exact that some hundreds of thousands of pills are fabricated daily on the premises of the original inventor. This gentleman, Thévenot by name, a chemist of Dijon, gained a large fortune by his manufactory, and it is satisfactory to learn that his descendants are doing as prosperous a trade as himself. The hardness of the times in no degree affects the sale of pills. People will have their pet luxury at any cost, and so while they are ready to give up their horses and carriages and toilettes, they retain their pill. I had the opportunity of conversing with several manufacturers in different branches of trade whilst at Dijon, and all complained of the slackness in trade. Only the fortunate fabricator of pills showed a cheerful countenance. Tar, chloroform, camphor, castor-oil, oil of eucalyptus, are amongst the favourite ingredients. The process of pill-making by machinery is extremely rapid and neat. Thin layers, composed of gum, sugar, and gelatine, are spread out in small pieces, the desired oil is then spread on the under layer, just as we put jam in a layer of paste; a second put on, the whole adhering like thin covered pastry. This is now placed between two iron plates indented with little holes the size of the pill, two turns are given to it in what may be called a baking oven, and out come the pills, each separating itself from its envelope, smooth, compact, and hard as shot. In fact, they are like mince-pies in miniature. Any essence indissoluble in water can be manufactured into pills, and of course the economy upon hand labour is very great.

The celebrated Dijon mustard is even more worthy of note as a manufacture. Its peculiar quality is a certain piquancy not found in any other mustard, of which there are deservedly celebrated manufac

cleared charcoal beds in the neighbouring forests, spaces difficult to utilise in any other way, as the young plants of green peas, potatoes, Freuch beans, and the like, would inevitably be devoured by the rabbits, wild boars, and other animals, who will on no account touch the mustard plant. The soil gives one peculiar flavour to the mustard, another is differently to be accounted for.

The mustard when in powder is mixed with the juice of new wine, lending that pleasant acidity with which we are familiar. But in order to obtain precisely the degree of acidity it is necessary that the grape be always in precisely the same state of unripeness, a degree more or less making all the difference. Amateurs of this celebrated condiment, of which the consumption is enormous in France and elsewhere, will like to have these few particulars concerning it.

We next come to the no less famous Dijon gingerbread, or pain d'épice, of which most travellers carry a sample home for their little friends. The nonnettes, as these cakes are generally called, figure constantly on French dinner-tables with the dessert, but few people, perhaps, suspect their origin. The pain d'épice is made of honey, rye-flour, and spice, no treacle entering into its composition as in our own gingerbread. But honey possesses, as we all know, besides its agreeable sweetness, a medicinal quality, rendering the pain d'épice as useful as it is ornamental on the family table. Its inventors were, oddly enough, neither bakers nor cooks, but the former grands seigneurs of Burgundy. These seigneurs set the example of curing disorders of frequent occurrence by means of palatable cakes; the bourgeoisie and, in their turn, the peasants, followed their example. Huge bakeries of the pain d'épice were set up at Dijon. The bakers made large fortunes, and to this day it is as flourishing a trade as any in Dijon, seven large manufactories now existing there.

I also visited a bookbinding and leather-work manufactory, but here the firm gave us less flourishing accounts than the heads of those before mentioned. Whether things go well or ill, people will have their pills, mustard, and gingerbread. They cut off such luxuries as missals, pocket-Looks, photographic albums, &c. We were assured by our friends here that the slackness of trade in France equals that in England. Nothing is stirring. No orders come in. Of course the anti-Republicans affirm that this chômage is the result of want of confidence in the Government, but there is no doubt whatever that France, like England and Germany, is going through a commercial crisis with which politics have little or nothing to do. The question is too vast to be entered upon here. There are one or two points worth mentioning concerning the process of binding, say, a photographic album; from the beginning to the end, twenty-five or thirty processes being gone through before the raw skin is converted into the polished, perfumed leather cover so familiar to us. The agreeable perfume of Russia leather does not depend on the skin

of the Russian birch-tree. Such being the case, we may have at some future time leather-work perfumed with the aromatic eucalyptus, or blue-gum tree, and other antiseptic and health-giving essences, our very books being made thereby proof against contagion of all kinds. This book binding and leather-work manufactory is a model in its sanitary and economic arrangements. The working hours of men, women, and young people-boys and girls being only permitted to enter factories after passing their first communion are eleven; but one hour and a half of these are deducted for meals and recreation. In order to maintain a good moral tone among the young people of different sexes, the strictest surveillance is exercised over them, and immediately anything approaching courtship is observed, the pair are summoned to the master's presence, and unless they consent to be married at once, are forthwith dismissed. This wholesome régime accounts for the respectability of the entire personnel, all of whom looked particularly clean, well dressed, and contented. I must admit, however, that the character given by heads of firms at Dijon of their workpeople was not reassuring. The French artisan is gradually losing, they say, those habits of economy which once characterised him, and still characterise the peasant. The political ferments through which France has passed of late years have had an exciting and pernicious effect upon the working classes generally. Both artisan and peasant take a feverish interest in all that goes on in the political world, and are said to spend an extravagant amount of time in reading the newspapers and discussing politics. Doubtless a decade of peace within and without would serve to calm this unnatural excitement; but in the meantime I am assured by those who know the country folk well, that even their habits of thrift and laboriousness are considerably impaired by the halfpenny journals. The ploughman stops his plough, the vintager lays down his knife, the reaper his sickle, at the approach of the postman with his packet of journals, and work is not resumed till the contents are devoured. Indeed, one cannot walk or drive in the country without observing instances in point.

One word more about the products of Dijon. It may interest many readers to know that wood vinegar was discovered by a Dijonnais named Molrat, a friend of Napoleon the First, who came to the aid of the discoverer when he had ruined himself by his investigations. Wood vinegar, so useful in medicinal and chemical processes, is largely manufactured at Dijon. Travellers in hot climates should never be without a small quantity of this valuable antiseptic. A few drops put in a bath heal the skin of all irritations caused by the bites or stings of insects, heat-boils, &c. A drop applied by the finger will cure a mosquito bite, and, applied more lavishly, an adder's sting. One pint, which costs a shilling, with the addition of a little perfume, will furnish a dozen bottles of toilette vinegar, and may be easily concocted by the traveller for himself.