cheaper for them to buy their home products in another city, to pay carriage both ways, and to pay the octroi at the city gates, than it was to send across the street in Issoire for the same article. Freedom from competition at Issoire enabled the quarry-owners to fix their own prices at home, and thus to broaden the slender margin of profits which came from outside trade. This peculiar condition reached its climax when one of Beltran's wagons from Clermont left Issoire with a load of millstones, while, next day, the same wagon, without unloading, carried the same millstones back to be used in the mills of the Issoire General Company of Flour and Meal! The schoolmaster was ecstatic over the stimulus thus given to several industries at once. It was like killing many birds with one stone. But the Issoire Association for the Home Production of Millstones was not satisfied with Clermont competition, even in this peculiar form, and an increase in the octroi soon put further importations out of the question.
There were also some curious omissions in the list, in spite of its length and complexity. An old woman, Widow Besoin, who lived near the Cantal gate, had five speckled Dominick hens, of which she was very fond. These hens were to her a source of profit as well as pleasure. She came to the mayor with the complaint that her neighbor. Farmer Bois-rouge, who lived just outside the city gate, brought in the eggs of his chickens free, and sold them at prices far below those she was compelled to charge for the eggs of her hens. The Bois-rouge chickens roamed over the whole farm and lived on grasshoppers and gleanings, while hers were fed on grain which had passed the octroi. It seems that the schoolmaster, in making up the octroi list, in arranging the o's had neglected to look for words beginning with "oe," and so had omitted the word "œuf," which is the French for "egg." So the Council was called together, a rate for "œufs" was agreed upon, and Widow Besoin's Dominick hens were free from the pauper competition of the chickens of Farmer Bois-rouge.
But the action of the octroi was, on the whole, as I have said, extremely beneficial. It filled the treasury again, and it stimulated a large number of infant industries, which had previously been unable to compete with established industries in surrounding towns, on account of the high prices of raw materials, and especially of labor, at Issoire. It is true that workman Jacques and some of the other laborers complained that these high wages were high in name only. In Clermont, men worked for three francs a day, but these three francs would buy twelve yards of calico or ten pounds of sugar, while the five francs received in Issoire would buy but ten yards of calico or eight pounds of sugar. But the schoolmaster wrote another letter to the "Gazette," showing that the question of wages was solved by an estimate of
