arts, these young creatures join merrily in the games of their new
companions. They have entered the institution old; they will leave it
young.'

"The Empress Eugenie delights in visiting the institution of the
Faubourg St. Antoine. This is natural. Her Majesty cannot but feel
pleasure in the contemplation of all she has accomplished by sacrificing
a magnificent, but idle ornament to the welfare of so many beings
rescued from misery and ignorance. These four hundred young girls will
be so many animated, happy, and grateful jewels, constituting for Her
Majesty in the present, and for her memory in the future, an ever new
set of jewels, an immortal ornament, a truly celestial talisman.

"A fresco painting represents, in a hemicycle, the Empress in her bridal
dress, offering to the Virgin a diamond necklace; young girls are
kneeling around her in prayer; admiration and fervent faith are depicted
on their brows."

A very large amount of the world's capital is represented in precious
stones, and ninety per cent of that capital so invested is in diamonds.
This was not always the case. Ancient millionnaires held their
enormous jewelry-riches more in colored stones than is the custom now.
Crystallized carbon has risen in the estimation of capitalists, and
crystallized clay has gone down in the scale of value. If the diamond be
the hardest known substance in the world's jewel-box, the pearl is by no
means its near relation in that particular. The daughters of Stilicho
slept undisturbed eleven hundred and eighteen years, with all their
riches in sound condition, except the pearls that were found with their
splendid ornaments. The other decorations sparkled in the light as
brilliantly as ever; but the pearls crumbled into dust, as their owners
had done centuries before. Eight hundred years before these ladies lived
and wore pearls, a queen with "swarthy cheeks and bold black eyes" tried
a beverage which cost, exclusive of the vinegar which partly composed
it, the handsome little sum of something over eighty thousand pounds.
Diamond and vinegar would not have mixed so prettily.

Pearls are perishable beauties, exquisite in their perfect state, but
liable to accident from the nature of their delicate composition. Remote
antiquity chronicles their existence, and immemorial potentates eagerly
sought for them to adorn their persons. Pearl-fisheries in the Persian
Gulf are older than the reign of Alexander; and the Indian Ocean, the