gree of savagery in
another. There is in absolute relation between the facilities for
pleasure and the frequency of suicide. Of all places in the world, Paris
is the most desolate to an invalid stranger. The custom of living there
in lodgings isolates the visitor; the occupants of the dwelling are not
alive to the claims of neighborhood; with his landlord he has only a
business and formal connection; thus thrown upon himself, without the
nerve or the spirits for external amusement, few situations are more
forlorn. The Parisian French are intensely calculating and selfish;
illness and grief are so alien to their tastes that, to the best of
their ability, they ignore and abjure them. As long as health permits,
out-of-door life or companionship solaces that within; the stranger may
be enchanted; but when confined to his apartment and dependent on chance
visitors or hireling services, he longs for a land where domestic life
and household comfort are better cultivated and understood.

The stranger's funeral is peculiarly sad everywhere, but in Paris its
melancholy is enhanced by the interference of foreign usages. Over the
dead as well as the living the municipal authorities claim instant
power, and the bereaved must submit to their time and arrangements in
depositing the mortal remains of the loved in the grave. The black
scarfs and chapeaux of the undertakers and their prescriptive orders
were strangely dissonant to the group of Americans collected at the
obsequies of a young countryman, and seemed incongruous when associated
with the simple Protestant ceremonial performed in another tongue. Under
the direction of those sable officials we entered the mourning coaches
and followed the plumed hearse. It is an impressive custom--one of the
humanities of the Catholic--to lift the hat at the sight of such a
procession; such an act, performed like this by prince and beggar in the
crowded street, so gay, busy, self-absorbed, bears affecting witness to
the common vicissitudes and instincts of mankind. The dead leaves
strewed the avenue of Pere la Chaise, and the bare trees creaked in the
gale as we threaded sarcophagi, tablets, and railed cenotaphs; in the
distance, smoke-canopied, stretched the vast city; around were countless
effigies of the dead of every rank, from the plain slab of the
undistinguished citizen to the wreathed obelisk of the hero, from the
ancient monument of Abelard and Heloise to the broken turf on the new
gra