scenes and tones of color to painters. What a forest of crossbeams
supported the mills with their huge sails and their wheels! What
strange effects were produced by the piles or props driven into the
water to project the upper floors of the houses above the stream!
Unfortunately, the art of genre painting did not exist in those days,
and that of engraving was in its infancy. We have therefore lost that
curious spectacle, still offered, though in miniature, by certain
provincial towns, where the rivers are overhung with wooden houses,
and where, as at Vendome, the basins, full of water grasses, are
enclosed by immense iron railings, to isolate each proprietor's share
of the stream, which extends from bank to bank.

The name of this street, which has now disappeared from the map,
sufficiently indicates the trade that was carried on in it. In those
days the merchants of each class of commerce, instead of dispersing
themselves about the city, kept together in the same neighborhood and
protected themselves mutually. Associated in corporations which
limited their number, they were still further united into guilds by
the Church. In this way prices were maintained. Also, the masters were
not at the mercy of their workmen, and did not obey their whims as
they do to-day; on the contrary, they made them their children, their
apprentices, took care of them, and taught them the intricacies of the
trade. In order to become a master, a workman had to produce a
masterpiece, which was always dedicated to the saint of his guild.
Will any one dare to say that the absence of competition destroyed the
desire for perfection, or lessened the beauty of products? What say
you, you whose admiration for the masterpieces of past ages has
created the modern trade of the sellers of bric-a-brac?

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the trade of the furrier was