and exposed to the rain for several days,
which has the same effect. Afterwards, the
stalks are set upright in conical bunches,
hollow in the centre, to dry as quickly as
possible. The flax is now fit to be stored, either
in barns, or in small stacks in the open air,
to await further preparation at the leisure of
the workman. All which has hitherto been
done may be considered as belonging to
agriculture; it now passes into the hands of
the artizan and the manufacturer, although
it may remain in the possession and under
the roof of the original grower. The men
who reduce the ready-steeped flax to a saleable
condition for spinning, are here called
écoucheurs, and they make a regular trade of it.
It furnishes them with employment the
greater part of the year, and when not so
engaged, they mostly fill up their time by
working on the land.

In order to see how flax becomes changed
from the bunch of twigs which it is
when the steeping is done, to the skein of
silk which it resembles before spinning, I
walked over to Les Saules the other day. A
little boy with a scarlet night-and-day cap,
lifted the tassel by way of salutation as I
approached the cottage of Pierre Heurtreuil.
Being expected, no diplomacy was necessary,
and the work went on without interruption.
There were two clay-built boutiques on the
premises. Pierre, the master, was himself
at work in one, with another man. In the
second, four men were installed in each angle,
with their respective implements, as if they
were playing a never ending game of
"cat-get-a-corner." Louis Carrout, after making
proper inquiries about the health of his
mother and sisters, laid his half-finished task
aside, and stepped into a little barn adjoining,
that I might see the whole thing from the
beginning. He then spread a sheaf of flax
evenly and rather thinly on the floor, and
pummelled it with a deadly weapon, which he
called a mail. I cannot quite translate the
word as mallet. It was something like a
hearth brush without any hairs, and with a
curved handle. The lump of wood from
which the bristles would proceed, was stout
and heavy, and cut at the bottom into sharp
tooth-like ridges, which promised to have a
similar effect upon the flax, to that of an
elephant's tooth upon a branch of acacia.
Louis, however, only beats the flax with his
wooden grinder, he does not quite chew it
into fragments. When his mail has munched
it enough, he divides the sheaf into handfuls,
in which it ever afterwards remains, and
keeps them separate by laying them across
each other in a circular fashion, making a
sort of harmless Catherine-wheel. The bundle
of handfuls is brought into the écoucherie,
and each one is further crushed between
the jaws of a thing standing on four legs,
properly termed a braque, because braques is
the French word for a lobster's pincers.
Both this and the previous operation really
  are modes of purposely imperfect mastication;
the mumbling breaks the stalk of the
plants but leaves the fibres uninjured and
entire.

The mail and the braque, both tools for
general service, are the property of the
master; the other implements belong to the
several workmen. After each handful has
been well crunched and tasted by the wooden
palate of the braque, it is tossed, after a twist,
to the foot of the écouche-pied—an upright
plank, with a horizontal slit a couple of
inches, or so, wide, at the height of three or
four feet from the ground, and firmly fixed
in a solid slab of wood. With his left hand
the scutcher introduces a tuft of braqued flax
into the slit, so that it hangs down on the
other side, and with his right he scrapes
and chops at it with a tool called an écouche,
something like a battledore, or a monstrous
wooden butter-knife. A leather strap
stretches just before his legs at the lower
part of the écouche-pied, that he may not bark
his own shins while scutching the flax. By
these means, and by turning it about, the
woody refuse is got rid of, and little else but
the pure fibre remains. This is the state in
which it is marketable, and is largely
purchased (by the pierre or bundle of four
French pounds), by the female amateurs of
home-spun linen.

As yet, however, it is but an unfinished
article; the fibres are still imperfectly
separated from each other, and a portion of
useless substance still remains. But the ladies
have it now in hand, and contrive to reduce
it about one half in weight. It is carefully
drawn through a couple of square combs (the
coarser one with iron, the finer with brazen
teeth), that are studded in formidable phalanx
on the surface of one and the same plank, till
the handful of scurfy-looking flax becomes a
beautiful, soft, and silken tress, now resembling
nothing so much as a lady's back hair,
after it has undergone the mysterious
manipulations of the toilet. Any forlorn,
melodramatic heroine, requiring to electrify her
audience by the recital of her stage sorrows,
though really suffering most at heart from
the scantiness of her natural periwig, has
only to make a journey to Les Saules to
obtain an unlimited quantity of flaxen locks.
With these picturesquely dishevelled, and
gilded by the beams of the rising footlights,
or agitated by the breezes which rustle
through the wings, she may successfully defy
the oppressor and the tyrant. But the
worthy maids and matrons here dream of no
such vanities as those. Their souls are
absorbed by the instinctive impulse of
spinning. Round goes the wheel, and smooth
glides the thread. The boiler boils it, the
weaver weaves it, the bleacher bleaches it, the
seamstress stitches it; and at last you have,
on your delighted good-looking person, a
shirt which will keep you warm and make
you respectable for years and years, outlasting