ed as if
he did, under the weight of the pulpit. One might question how well the
preacher in the pulpit liked the suggestion of the figure beneath it.
The sculptured screen and gallery, the exquisite spiral stairways, the
carved figures about the organ, the tablets on the walls,--one in
particular relating the fall of two young girls from the gallery, and
their miraculous protection from injury,--all these images found their
counterpart in my memory. I did not remember how very beautiful is the
stained glass in the _charniers_, which must not be overlooked by
visitors.

It is not far from St. Etienne du Mont to the Pantheon. I cannot say
that there is any odor of sanctity about this great temple, which has
been consecrated, if I remember correctly, and, I will not say
desecrated, but secularized from time to time, according to the party
which happened to be uppermost. I confess that I did not think of it
chiefly as a sacred edifice, or as the resting-place, more or less
secure, of the "_grands hommes_" to whom it is dedicated. I was
thinking much more of Foucault's grand experiment, one of the most
sublime visible demonstrations of a great physical fact in the records
of science. The reader may not happen to remember it, and will like,
perhaps, to be reminded of it. Foucault took advantage of the height of
the dome, nearly three hundred feet, and had a heavy weight suspended by
a wire from its loftiest point, forming an immense pendulum,--the
longest, I suppose, ever constructed. Now a moving body tends to keep
its original plane of movement, and so the great pendulum, being set
swinging north and south, tended to keep on in the same direction. But
the earth was moving under it, and as it rolled from west to east the
plane running through the north and south poles was every instant
changing. Thus the pendulum appeared to change its direction, and its
deviation was shown on a graduated arc, or by the marks it left in a
little heap of sand which it touched as it swung. This experiment on the
great scale has since been repeated on the small scale by the aid of
other contrivances.

My thoughts wandered back, naturally enough, to Galileo in the Cathedral
at Pisa. It was the swinging of the suspended lamp in that edifice which
set his mind working on the laws which govern the action of the
pendulum. While he was meditating on this physical problem, the priest
may have been holding forth on the dangers of meddling with matte