times depends their entire fortune, often tremble all over in opening the letter of a young girl, to whom they communicate all their successes. If I had time, I would relate some of these secret histories which have had no witnesses but the cold walls of this severe monument—this commercial monastery—and some English or American cottage, and no intermediaries but some unhappy sheets of paper which arrived at their destination impregnated with marine effluvia, and already several months old! I am sure that these secret dramas, genuine pictures of real life, would be found interesting even after the perusal of our modern novels, whose heroes, in their amorous phrensy, might cleave mountains, rifle pedestrians, and set the universe on fire, in order to obtain their fair one, but who would be incapable of adding up figures and of working like journeymen for her sake.
The ground floor of each factory is devoted exclusively to store-rooms; beneath the sheds are the scales in which the money is weighed, for it is never counted. The weighing concluded, a Chinese is intrusted to examine the piastres. The operator is generally a quasi-gentleman; a man in a long dress of blue silk, with his pig-tail well plaited, and his head protected by a cap, who sits down with his legs crossed by the side of the balance, and examines one after the other every piece of money. This rival
