and have cunning dogs with them; netting and
snaring game on the sly; dominoes, of course,
and pitch-penny, and nine-pins; now and
then a ball. A summer's engagement of this
kind would be tempting to many a town
journeyman.

As soon as that lot of wood is worked up,
the place is deserted, and fresh huts or
barracks are erected, close to the next untouched
mass of materials which is delivered into their
hands. The villages adjacent to these encampments
are mostly abandoned for the time;
you may ask in vain for a lodging or for
refreshment there, while in the forest itself there
are plenty of inhabitants and good entertainment.

Every head sabotier employs, on an average,
from fifty to sixty workmen. One Paris
sabotier is said to employ, in the forests in
the departments of Sarthe, Orne, Vosges, and
Cantal, five-aud-twenty head sabotiers, who,
in their turn, are the means of employing a
million peasants. He receives, on an annual
average, sixty thousand pairs of sabots in
their first stage (to be described) which he
gets finished, carved, and blacked, at Paris.
In Paris itself, none but fancy sabots are
made, namely, the fine shoe-sabots, which are
trimmed with cloth and leather and other
materials. The above number sounds high;
but a provincial sabotier told me that one
Paris house had from four to five hundred
thousand pairs of sabots yearly passing
through their hands; and to be more precise
in his information, he gave me the address of
M. Hilarion Juigner, 35, Rue de Rambuteau,
Paris, as another leading member of the
trade.

Besides these lords of the sabot, with their
gigantic undertakings, there are scattered all
over France, though very irregularly, a large
number of humbler sabotiers, who constantly
stay and conduct their business at home,
depending on their own neighbourhood for a
supply of wood, and employing only their own
families (if their sons be old enough), or two
or three workmen. Three is the usual number
of artists required to finish a sabot, exclusive
of the final blacking, and the preliminary
sawing and felling. Each man is generally
able to perform all the processes; but, besides
the known advantages of a division of labour,
it is found, practically, that the exertion of
muscle in the first rough fashioning, in the
scooping, and in the finishing off, is of so
different a nature, that it takes a man a day
or two to put himself into good training for
the performance of any part of the trio,
after having for some time "got his hand
in " with another. A good workman at
these quiet little workshops, which go on
steadily all the year round, can earn his fifteen
francs a week. In the forest, the men who
perform the three principal processes earn
two francs a day; the women and children
are considered as apprentices, and paid half a
franc a day.

Almost all the sabots made in France are
sold for home consumption; still, they are
exported, to a trifling amount, into Belgium,
England, and Algeria. This exportation
went on increasing up to 1844, but has since
diminished.

The reader will now accompany me, I hope,
into the workroom of one of these smaller and
stationary tradesmen, and see a sabot made
from beginning to end. If he choose afterwards
to go alone, and bodily enter the studio
of any similar village sculptor, he has only to
present himself; utter his "Bonjour" with
proper politeness; and the secrets of sabot-
making will be unveiled for his contemplation.

The Fabricant who gives us the
permission to pry, must stop at home in his
shop, in the midst of his variety of wooden
treasures; not that he is wanted there,
Madame keeps guard, and attends to the
customers; but he looks very, very ill.
I only hope he may see the green leaves
burst forth on the sabot-trees, next spring.
He wishes he could speak English; he would
go to England, and try if a market for his
goods could not be found there. I tell him
it is not too late to learn, and that it will
serve to amuse him while he is recovering his
strength. He smiles and shakes his head.

He directs us to his factory in Blind Ass
Street, or Rue de l'Ane Aveugle—the real name
—which I give for the encouragement of such
curious persons as take pleasure in tracking
the steps of a journalist. As a further help
to guess the riddle, it is equi-distant from the
Bull's Foot Hotel and the Café of the Coming
out of the Tribunals. Turn down the first
lane to the left in Blind Ass Street, and the
first door to the left is our sabot factory. We
knock and enter. After half-a-dozen words,
and a smile of mutual amusement, the
performance begins.

Here, as in the woods, three men constitute
a complete sabot-gang; only, there is but one
gang here, instead of twenty. They are
making rather a superior article, and therefore
the blocks lying about the room are all
of walnut-wood. The bark is still on them,
and they are sawn, across the trunk or the
branch, into various lengths, in proportion to
the diameter of the tree at the place of
sawing. Trunks that are too thick can only
be used wastefully; branches that are too
thin are of no use at all. For, all the sabots
which a clever workman can contrive to find
in a tree, lie hid there in the position of
running up and down the tree, or along the
branches, and not across either it or them.
Therefore, those portions of the trunk which
will make adult sabots, are short cylinders
about a French foot long; the childrens' and
babies' cylinders from the arms of the tree,
are cut into the lengths that may be required
for juvenile sabots.

To begin with the beginning. The cylinder
of wood, or thick slice out of a tree, is placed