Paris, however, is not all of France. Sometimes I have thought not the
best part of it. There is the south of France, with Avignon, the heart of
Provence, seat of the French papacy six hundred years ago, the metropolis
of Christendom before the Midi was a region--Paris yet a village, and Rome
struggling out of the debris of the ages--with Arles and Nimes, and, above
all, Tarascon, the home of the immortal Tartarin, for next-door neighbors.
They are all hard by Marseilles. But Avignon ever most caught my fancy, for
there the nights seem peopled with the ghosts of warriors and cardinals,
and there on festal mornings the spirits of Petrarch and his Laura walk
abroad, the ramparts, which bade defiance to Goth and Vandal and Saracen
hordes, now giving shelter to bats and owls, but the atmosphere laden with
legend

_"...tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance and Provencal song and sun-burnt mirth."_

Something too much of this! Let me not yield to the spell of the
picturesque. To recur to matters of fact and get down to prose and the
times we live in let us halt a moment on this southerly journey and have a
look in upon Lyons, the industrial capital of France, which is directly on
the way.

The idiosyncrasy of Lyons is silk. There are two schools of introduction in
the art of silk weaving, one of them free to any lad in the city, the other
requiring a trifle of matriculation. The first of these witnesses the whole
process of fabrication from the reeling of threads to the finishing of
dress goods, and the loom painting of pictures. It is most interesting of
course, the painstaking its most obvious feature, the individual weaver
living with his family upon a wage representing the cost of the barest
necessities of life. Again, and ever and ever again, the inequalities of