When we eat our meals we almost always do so indoors, where we can see no one else and no one else can see us. Butthe French often eat outof- doors, on the sidewalk or overlooking the sidewalk, where they can see every one and every one can see them, and that’s where many of their most famous restaurants are placed.

The French drink a great deal of wine with their meals, much as we drink milk or coffee or tea, and there are manygreat farms in different parts of France where they raise grapes from which they make the wine. These farms are vineyards—called “vinyards.”

Cloth is made out of several things—linen, cotton, wool, and silk; linen, cotton, and wool are chiefly for use,but silk is chiefly for beauty. In Ireland cloth is made out of linen, in England cloth is made out of cotton and wool, but in France cloth is made out of silk for beauty’s sake. Linen and cotton are made from plants, woolis made from sheep, but silk is made from a little caterpillar. We call this caterpillar a silkworm, but he is not really a worm at all. A worm is born, lives, and dies always a worm, but a caterpillar turns into a beautifulmoth or butterfly if let alone. Most caterpillars, however, we try to kill, for they eat the leaves of trees and other green things. But silkworms are so valuable that people feed them leaves and raise them as our farmersraise chickens. The silk caterpillar likes a special kind of leaf—the leaves of the mulberry-tree. So in the valley of a river in France called the Rh渀攀 the French people grow mulberry-trees—not for the mulberries butfor the leaves, which they gather and feed to the silkworms.

After the silk caterpillar has eaten, he spins a fine thread of silk almost a quarter of a mile long out of his ownbody, as a spider spins a spider web out of his own body. The silk caterpillar winds himself up in this thread as he spins it round and round and round until he is completely covered up and looks in his cover of silk threadsomething like a peanut. Then he goes to sleep inside, and if he waked up he would come out a moth; but they don’t let him wake up. They boil him while he is asleep, till he is soft, and then they un wind the thread whichhe has wound round himself and use it to make silk cloth, silk stockings, silk ribbons, and all the silk things that women love. On the River Rh渀攀 is the greatest place in Europe for making silk. It is called Lyons.