characteristic of the town. He had dined with a friend at Pousset's; he
had passed the evening at the Exhibition, and he had had a bare touch of
the real thing in the Rue de Tournon; but even there it was in the
company of foreigners. Therefore, I repeat, he woke up next morning
wondering what he should do, for the veneer of Paris is the thinnest in
the world, and he had exhausted it in one feverish day.

Luckily for him, the room in which he lay was French, and had been
French for a hundred years. You looked out of the window into a sky cut
by the tall Mansard roofs of the eighteenth century; and over the stones
of what had been the Scotch College you could see below you at the foot
of the hill all the higher points of the island--especially the Sainte
Chapelle and the vast towers of the Cathedral. Then it suddenly struck
him that the air was full of bells. Now, it is a curious thing, and one
that every traveller will bear me out in, that you associate a country
place with the sound of bells, but a capital never. Caen is noisy enough
and Rouen big enough, one would think, to drown the memory of music; yet
any one who has lived in his Normandy remembers their perpetual bells;
and as for the admirable town of Chinon, where no one ever goes, I
believe it is Ringing Island itself. But Paris one never thinks of as a
place of bells. And yet there are bells enough there to take a man right
into the past, and from there through fairyland to hell and out and back
again.

If I were writing of the bells, I could make you a list of all the
famous bells, living and dead, that haunt the city, and the tale of what
they have done would be a history of France. The bell of the St.
Bartholomew over against the Louvre, the tocsin of the Hotel de Ville
that rang the knell of the Monarchy, the bell of St. Julien that is as
old as the University, the old Bourdon of Notre Dame that first rang
when St. Louis brought in the crown of thorns, and the peal that saluted
Napoleon, and the new Bourdon that is made of the guns of Sebastopol,
and the Savoyarde up on Montmartre, a new bell much larger than the
rest. This morning the air was full of them. They came up to the height
on which the traveller lay listening; they came clear and innumerable
over the distant surge of the streets; he spent an hour wondering at
such an unusual Parliament and General Council of Bells. Then he said to
himself: "It must be some great feast of the Church." He was in