"What is the matter?" asked madame.
"I have just been trying on Madame Regnault's new costume, the gray faille and velvet, you know, that she selected when she came with you. It is a charming costume, and she looked sweetly in it. The general came in before I got through. 'Do you call that a costume?' he asked in a passion. 'It makes her look like a fright. Take it away: never let me see it again.' Poor little madame hurried me to get it off. 'Take it away! out of the house with it!' cried he as if he were commanding a regiment of dragoons.—'I can't take it away,' said I. 'It was made to order—madame selected it herself—and you cannot expect me to take it back.' I was frightened to death, but I couldn't lose the money, you know. The window was open: he seized the unlucky costume, and giving it a little whirl, sent it flying out of the window over the balustrade. Madame was going to send her maid for it, but no; the wind caught it, and away it went out of the court, and where it lighted or who picked it up is more than I know, or madame either. It may be a fine thing to be a general's wife, but I'd rather be a dressmaker."
And the little dressmaker laughed till she cried to think of madame's handsome costume sailing out of the window over the Avenue Haussmann, and lighting like a balloon on the head of some lucky or luckless passer-by.
Mary E. Blair.
PRIMARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION IN FRANCE.
For a long period, France, with her ancient university and her venerable scholastic institutions—which after the Renaissance drew to themselves the flower of the youth of Europe—may be said to have led the way as regards general education. It has only been in modern times that the progress made by the Anglo-Saxon and German nations has placed, at all events, primary instruction in France somewhat in the rear of other countries. As for her system of secondary and superior education, it has even within the last few years elicited many expressions of approval from foreigners competent to form a judgment on the subject. In the following pages we propose giving a succinct account of the actual system and position of primary and secondary education in France, speaking of what has been done since the close of the war in 1871, and of what yet remains to be done.
PRIMARY EDUCATION.
The great crying evil in France is the lack of education among the poorer classes, who nevertheless, by the democratic constitution of their country, are called upon, together with the rich and the middle classes, to take their share in the government. This evil is recognized in France, and each fresh Assembly meets at Versailles with the determination of having primary schools built and of having every child taught at least to read and write. But these good intentions are terribly hampered by the all-absorbing military appropriations, which, swallowing up some 500,000,000 francs annually, do not allow the ministers and deputies, well disposed as they are, to appropriate to the education of all France a sum much exceeding that expended by the single State of Pennsylvania in the same cause. Still, the acknowledgment of the existence of the evil is in itself a great step toward remedying it, and the France of to-day is making progress in this respect. Before the last war, instead of saying with Terence,