ing a torch. It was almost as if the dead had spoken with a living voice, to see that fateful symbol of a power of thought and passion that never can die, while human hearts remain human. There is a fine statue of Voltaire in the vault that holds his tomb. Those mausoleums are merely commemorative. The body of Voltaire was destroyed with quicklime when laid in the grave, at the Abbey of Celleries, so that it might not be cast out of consecrated ground. Other tombs of departed greatness I found in Père la Chaise. Molière and La Fon

taine rest side by side. Racine is a neighbour to them. Talma, Auber, Rossini, De Musset, Desclée, and many other illustrious names, may there be read, in the letters of death. Rachel's tomb is in the Hebrew quarter of the cemetery - a tall, narrow, stone structure, with a grated door, over which the name of RACHEL is graven, in black letters. Looking through the grating I saw a shelf on which were vases and flowers, and beneath it were fourteen immortelle wreaths. A few cards, left by pilgrims to that solemn shrine of genius and renown, were upon the floor, and I ventured to add my own, in humble reverence of genius, to the names which thus gave

homage to the memory of a great actress; and I gathered a few leaves from the shrubbery that grows in front of her grave. The famous cemetery is comparatively destitute of flowers and grass. It contains a few avenues of trees, but for the most part it is a mass of ponderous tombs, crowded together upon a hot hill-side, traversed by little stony pathways sweltering in sun and dust. No sadder graveyard was ever seen. All the acute anguish of remediless suffering, all the abject misery and arid desolation of hopeless grief, is symbolised in that melancholy place. Artisans were repairing the tomb of Heloise and Abelard, and this, for a while, converted a bit of old romance to modern commonness. Still, I saw the tomb, and it was elevating to think that there may be "Words which are things, hopes which do not deceive."

The most gorgeous modern building in Paris is the Opera House. No building in America can vie with it in ornate splendour. Some observers do but scant justice to the solid qualities in the French character. That character is mercurial, yet it contains elements of stupendous intensity and power; and this you feel, as perhaps you may never have felt it before, when you look at such

works as the Opera House, the Pantheon, the Madeleine, the Invalides, the Louvre, the Luxembourg, and the miles of stone embankment that hem in the Seine on both its sides. The grandest old building in Paris also a living witness to French power and purpose· is the church of Notre Dame. It will not displace, in the affectionate reverence of Americans, the glory of Westminster Abbey; but it will fill almost an equal place in their memory. Its arches are not so grand; its associations are not so sacred. But it is exceedingly beautiful in forms and in simplicity, and no one can help loving it; and by reason of its skilfully devised vistas it is perhaps invested with more of the alluring attribute of mystery. Some of its associations are especially impressive. You may there see the chapel in which Mary Stuart was married to her first husband, Francis II. of France, and in which Henry VI., of England, was crowned; and you may stand on the spot on which Napoleon Buonaparte invested himself with the imperial diadem which with his own hands he placed on his own head. I climbed the tower of that

1 Richard I. of England, at his first coronation, on September 3, 1189, in Westminster Abbey, took

famous cathedral and at the loftiest attainable height pictured in fancy the awful closing scene of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. That romance seemed the truth then, and Claude Frollo, Esmeralda, and Quasimodo were as real as Richelieu. There is a vine growing near the bell-tower and some children were at play there, on the stone platform. I went in beneath the bell and smote upon it with a wooden mallet and heard with pleasure its rich, melodious, soulful music. The four hundred steps are well worn that lead to the tower of Notre Dame. There are few places on earth so fraught with memories; few that so well repay the homage of a pilgrim from a foreign land.

the crown from the altar and delivered it to the archbishop. In both cases the purpose was to sig nify that the crown was not the gift of the church.

VII.

ELY AND ITS CATHEDRAL.

ELY, CAMBRIDGESHIRE, September 6, 1891.

Gray and sombre London, gloomy beneath vast clouds of steel and bronze, is once more left behind. Old Highgate flits by and we roll through the network of little towns that fills all the space between Hornsey and Tottenham. The country along our course is one of exceptional interest, and but that Buggins the Builder has marred it by making the houses alike it would be one of peculiar beauty. Around Tottenham the dwellings are interspersed with meadows and there are market-gardens and nurseries of flowers, -the bright green of carrot-tops and of the humble but portly cabbage being pleasantly relieved by masses of brilliant hollyhock. Broad fields ensue, — cultivated to the utmost and smiling with plenty; and around some of the houses are beautiful green lawns, divided with hedges of hawthorn. The country, for the most part, is