capacity of maire by twelve councillors--in a larger commune it would
have been fifteen--and the council met four times in the year. If it was
desirable that they should meet on any other occasion, he must write to
the prefect of the arrondissement for permission, specifying the
business which they wished to conduct, and to this specified business
they must confine themselves entirely. Then he wished to know, had we
maires such as he in England? Hereupon I drew a fancy picture of the
Lord Mayor of London, receiving the Queen and the Royal Family in
general in a friendly way, and giving them a dinner,--which, he
observed, must cost a good deal, a great deal. However, he looked round
upon his fields and houses and mountains, and seemed to think that he
could himself stand a considerable drain upon his purse for the
reception of royalty; and possibly he is now anxious that the Emperor
should pass that way, during the five years to which the tenure of the
mayoralty is restricted. Both of my companions were strong in their
French sympathies--the one because under the new rule all communal
affairs were so much better organised, the other because a wonderful
change for the better had taken place in the government superintendence
of schools. Theirs was formerly an odd corner of a kingdom that did not
care much about them, and was not homogeneous; it was now an integral
part of a well-ordered empire. They confessed that the present state of
things cost them much more in taxes, &c., excepting in the upper
mountains, where Rosset had a cousin who paid even less than under
Sardinian rule.

Of course, we talked a little on Church questions; and they were
astonished to hear that I was not only an ecclesiastic, but an ordained
priest,--a sort of thing which they had fancied did not exist in the
English Church. Rosset said the _curés_ of small communes had about £40
a year, but I must have more than that, or I could not afford to travel