Revolution? He answered he did not gain now half as much as before. 66 Why?" said I. "Monsieur," he replied, "quand le commerce marche "-here he gave his poor horse a hard whip on his shoulder-" il y a beaucoup de gens qui font leurs courses; quand il n'y a pas de commerce, ils font leurs courses à pied."1 "Have you ever been to the top of the Pantheon?" said I, ruminating on the magnificent prospect it had afforded me. "No, never," he replied. "I have been thirty years in Paris," he added, “but have never mounted to that!" When trade prospers, a number of people ride; when there is no trade, they walk. HOSPICE DES ENFANS TROUVÉS. 66 2 1 ONCE upon a time, a gentleman, entering a fiacre after rather too good a dinner, desired the coachman to drive him "to the Devil." After rumbling through Paris for some time the carriage stopped suddenly at the corner of a street. Quel numéro, Monsieur?" said the driver, speaking very quietly over his shoulder. The gentleman, on looking to his right, saw just above him, inscribed on the wall, "RUE D'ENFER"! In the same street, almost immediately opposite to that magnificent observatory -the eastern front of which is considered to be the latitude of Paris; in one of the rooms of which French philosophers have also traced its longitude; in which are telescopes for looking into the heavens; an anenometer for indicating the direction of the wind; pluviometers for ascertaining the amount of rain that falls at Paris during the year; astronomical instruments of every description; a theatre 1 What number, Sir? 2 Hell-street. capable of holding 800 persons, in which M. Arago gives his lectures; also a magnificent library of 45,000 volumes-I came, before dinner to a small tricoloured flag, dangling at the end of a sort of barber's pole, pointing upwards, over a square hole in a wall, about 18 inches high by 20 inches broad, filled up with a black circular board, that looked as if it were a letterbox, but which is, in fact, a "tour," or little turn-about, for the reception of" babbies ;" and as the idea, on the mere showing of the case, appeared an odd one, and as the institution is open to the public, I rang at the large gate, and as soon as it was opened I was intending to explain the object of my visit, when the porter, who knew what I wanted before I mentioned it, told me to sit down on a bench in the hall, and then, ringing a bell, added that a person would almost immediately come to attend me. With the concierge or porter, who now walked into a small room in front of me, there sat a nice, homely, benevolent-looking Sour de la Charité, placidly occupied in mending, through spectacles, her coarse rough blue serge gown, which having, for that purpose, been turned up on her lap, showed me about a foot and a half of a white, very thick, soft, warm, comfortable-looking cotton petticoat. After I had been sitting about three or four minutes, the bell I had pulled rang again, and the porter, who had admitted me, opening it, a woman in a bright scarlet cloak, surmounted by a white cap with a profusion of blue ribbons, entered, stating she had just come from Valenciennes to see her niece. The porter looked as stout as if he himself were going to be confined,-I mean by gout. His collar was red, his face was red, and, apparently from constitutional reasons, rather than from any other cause, it instantly became much. redder. Somehow or other, the woman in scarlet, rightly or wrongly I know not, had inflamed it. She very quietly, after passing by me, walked into the little room opposite. 1 "Madame est très cavalière !" said the porter to the sœur, pointing to the person who had offended him; the sœur, however, desisting from her work, but without dropping her gown, spoke to the culprit softly, gently, and kindly. A door on my left now opened, and I perceived a respectable-looking woman, who, without entering, by a signal with her hand gave me to understand she was ready to accompany As soon as I was beyond the door she had • me. I Madame is rather too free! opened, I found myself in a large hollow square, formerly the convent of the Prêtres de l'Oratoire, surrounded by the buildings of the institution. In the centre of the front range, three stories high, there beamed that emblem of order and regularity which characterises every public establishment in Paris, a clock. On the left were inscribed over two adjoining doors the generic words "Bureaux," "Economal." On the right was a lofty chapel, containing two tiers of windows. About eighteen years ago there were in France no less than 296 foundling-hospitals, into which babies-often carried through the streets three or four together in a basket at the back of a porter employed to collect them-were injected without the slightest inquiry. In 1833, in consequence of the great mortality that had been observed to take place among them, and for other equally cogent reasons, the permission to do so was so far restricted that it was deemed necessary the infants should be presented with “a certificate of abandonment," signed by a commissary of police, who, although he was permitted to admonish the mother or person abandoning the child, was not authorised to refuse the certificate required. This check, natural as it sounds, reduced the number of foundling-hospitals to |