ous cast-iron abortion at Rouen. I recollected that in my
younger days I had been defrauded of my fair share of tower-climbing.
Hohenfels had a saying that most travelers are a sort of children, who
need to touch all they see, and who will climb to every broken tooth
of a castle they find on their way, getting a tiresome ascent and hot
sunshine for their pains. "I trust we are wiser," he would observe,
so unanswerably that I passed with him up the Rhine quite, as I may
express it, on the ground floor.

I marched to the cathedral, determined to ascend, and when I saw the
look of it changed my mind.

The sacristan, in fact, advised me not to go up after he had taken my
fee and obtained a view of my proportions over the tube of his
key, which he pretended to whistle into. We sat down together as I
recovered my breath, after which I wandered through the nave with
my guide, admiring the statue of the original architect, who stands
looking at the interior--a kind of Wren "circumspecting" his own
monument. At high noon the twelve apostles come out from the famous
horologe and take up their march, and chanticleer, on one of the
summits of the clock-case, opens his brazen throat and crows loud
enough to fill the farthest recesses of the church with his harsh
alarum.

A portly citizen was talking to the sacristan. "I hear many objections
to that bird, sir," he remarked to me, "from fastidious tourists: one
thinks that a peacock, spreading its jewels by mechanism, would have
a richer effect. Another says that a swan, perpetually wrestling with
its dying song, would be more poetical. Others, in the light of late
events, would prefer a phoenix."

The dress of the stout citizen announced a sedentary man rather than a
cosmopolitan. He had a shirt-front much hardened with starch; a white
waistcoat, like an alabaster carving, which pushed his shirt away
up round his ears; and a superb bluebottle-colored coat, with metal
buttons. It was the costume of a stay-at-home, and I learned afterward
that he was a local professor of geography and political science--the
first by day, the last at night only in beer-gardens and places of
resort.

[Illustration: THE HIGHEST SPIRE IN EUROPE.]

"Nay," I said, "the barnyard bird is of all others the fittest for a
timepiece: he chants the hours for the whole country-side, and an old
master of English song has called him Nature's 'crested clock.'"

"With all deference," said the bourgeois, "I woul