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sion of that dazzling d a , I can even now feel the picturesque justice of the fabulist's description of Cinderella's creole costume : Ça té ka baille ou mal ziè!—(it would have given you a pain in your eyes to look at her !) . . . Even the every-day Martinique costume is slowly changing. Year by year the " calendeuses "—the women who paint and fold the turbans—have less work to do ;— the colors of the douillette are becoming less vivid ;— while more and more young colored girls are being élevées en chapeau (" brought up in a hat " ) — i . e., dressed and educated like the daughters of the whites. These, it must be confessed, look far less attractive in the latest Paris fashion, unless white as the whites themselves : on the other hand, few white girls could look well in douillette and mouchoir,—not merely because of color contrast, but because they have not that amplitude of limb and particular cambering of the torso peculiar to the half-breed race, with its large bulk and stature. Attractive as certain coolie women are, I observed that all who have adopted the Martinique costume look badly in it : they are too slender of body to wear it to advantage. Slavery introduced these costumes, even though it probably did not invent them ; and they were necessarily doomed to pass away with the peculiar social conditions to which they belonged. If the population clings still to its douillettes, mouchoirs, and foulards, the fact is largely due to the cheapness of such attire. A girl can dress very showily indeed for about twenty francs—shoes excepted ; — and thousands never wear shoes. But the fashion will no doubt have become cheaper and uglier within another decade. At the present time, however, the stranger might be sufficiently impressed by the oddity and brilliancy of these dresses to ask about their origin,—in which case it