parliament, the act supersedes the necessity
for a completion of the registry. The cost of
this office is under three thousand a-year, and
it takes six thousand in fees, so that it yields
a profit to the exchequer in the shape of a
tax on joint stock partnership.

The Board of Trade is further charged
with the promotion of science and art in
their relation with industrial pursuits. It
therefore has central training-schools for
teachers and local schools of design, which it
maintains by inspection, by a cheap supply
of good models, etc., by training teachers,
encouraging students with exhibitions, and by
limited pecuniary help. There are in the
provinces no schools of science; but there
are twenty-one schools of design, to which
annual grants are made, varying from one
hundred and fifty to six hundred pounds
a-piece. The grants are administered by
local committees, subject to the direction of
the Board of Trade. An attempt is also
being made to induce the formation, of self-
supporting schools of design, by guaranteeing
for the first year a master's salary. In
connection with the central school of design at
Marlborough House, lectures are delivered
upon fabrics, wood engraving, porcelain
painting, casting, and such topics. There are
two other training schools in London—one
at Somerset House for males, the other in
Gower Street for females.

For the encouragement of science there
exists at present only a central school
connected with the Museum of Practical
Geology in Jermyn Street. It has laboratories
and professors. It is the home also of
the geological survey and mining records.
The whole department of art and practical
science costs forty-five thousand pounds
a year. All the institutions in association
with it furnish annual reports, and obtain
every year some little direct attention from
the legislature.

There is an office in Whitehall Place
belonging to the Board of Trade for the
registration of useful and ornamental
designs. The registry is first provisional and
then complete; when complete it confers a
copyright for a limited period, varying from
nine months for a shawl pattern to three
years for a carpet or for articles in earthenware,
wood, glass, or metal.

The corn-office, which is now a separate
department, has lost all its glory since the
abolition of the sliding-scale. It used to fix
by averages struck from six weeks returns of
price, the fluctuating rate of duty. Now it
is merely a producer of statistics. The statisical
department of the Board of Trade was
devised for great purposes. It was to
provide figures on all subjects; but since every
department makes its own tables, more than
half the work of this statistical department
is executed and published and paid for in
duplicate. These are the two departments
which it is proposed to reduce to their just
proportions, and throw into the
miscellaneous business of the Board of Trade.

Throughout the preceding account, it will
be observed the Board of Trade and Plantations
is concerned with trade alone. Recently,
some part of its function as an authority
upon colonial matters was revived by Lord
Grey. That nobleman, when colonial minister,
being required to furnish constitutions
for the Cape of Good Hope and the Australian
colonies, remitted so grave a responsibility
to the whole "Committee of the Privy
Council appointed for the Consideration of all
matters relating to Trade and Foreign
Plantations." The president and vice-president were
then, for once, surrounded by the whole
august body of privy councillors, otherwise
attached only nominally to their board, and
in such committee the outlines of these two
colonial constitutions were defined.

TWO FRENCH FARMERS.

DESIRING, for the sake of experience, to live
during some time in the household of one of
the small proprietors abounding in the villages
of France, I took the train at Paris for a place
of which I knew nothing and had never heard
the name. In an hour I was set down at the
station, quitting which, I found myself on a
large plain covered with ripening harvests.
The walk of a mile or two brought me to
some white houses roofed with red tiles and
embedded in a nest of fruit trees. That was
my village. Beyond, rose a hill cultivated
half-way to the top, and giving promise of a
happy vintage. Seen from a little distance
all looked well.

Closer acquaintance, however, did not
prepossess me with the place I had chosen for a
temporary home. The entrance to the village
was quite wretched; the roadway was
broken up and full of ruts or rubbish heaps;
the hedges ran to waste and rubbed the carts
that passed between; the fruit trees had an
aged look; the palings before houses were
broken or wormeaten; a black pool, about
which pigs and ducks were busy, received
the filth of the place and filled the air
with pestilence. To this pool men brought
cattle to water; and here, women were
beating and rinsing reddish-brown stuffs,
kneeling upon straw and striking their stuff
with the battoir or round stick on a smooth
deal plank laid for the purpose. This was
perhaps enough of clothes washing to satisfy
a population that seemed to be almost wholly
unaccustomed to the washing of the person.

A high and thick lichen-covered wall,
pierced by a large doorway, belonged to
the sort of farm with which I wished to
make acquaintance. I pulled the latchet
of a small side door, and entered a court
that I had to travel ankle-deep in mire
and the accumulated refuse of the stables.
Cocks and hens, pigs, ducks and their