T.
PALACE AT STRASBURG.
THE MANDARIN CHING'S CART.
HALT OF THE CARAVAN AT HO-CHI-WOU.
AVENUE OF ANIMALS LEADING TO THE TOMBS OF THE EMPERORS.
PORTICO TO THE TOMBS OF THE EMPERORS.
THE GREAT WALL: THE NANG-KAO PASS.
CHAPEL OF THE SUMMER PALACE.
VALLEY AND BEEHIVES.
COWS COMING DOWN THE HILLSIDE BY A MOUNTAIN STREAM.
A PROCESSION.

THE NEW HYPERION.

FROM PARIS TO MARLY BY WAY OF THE RHINE.

III.--THE FEAST OF SAINT ATHANASIUS.

[Illustration: THE PAULISTS.]

As I parted from my stout old friend Joliet, I saw him turn to empty
the last half of our bottle into the glasses of a couple of tired
soldiers who were sucking their pipes on a bench. And again the old
proverb of Aretino came into my head: "Truly all courtesy and good
manners come from taverns." I grasped my botany-box and pursued my
promenade toward Noisy.

The village of Noisy has made (without a pun) some noise in history.
One of its ancient lords, Enguerrand de Marigny, was the inventor
of the famous gibbet of Montfaucon, and in the poetic justice which
should ever govern such cases he came to be hung on his own gallows.
He was convicted of manifold extortions, and launched by the common
executioner into that eternity whither he could carry none of his
ill-gotten gains with him. Here, at least, we succeed in meeting a
guillotine which catches its maker. By a singular coincidence another
lord of Noisy, Cardinal Balue, underwent a long detention in an
iron-barred cage--one of those famous cages, so much favored by Louis
XI., of which the cardinal, as we learn from the records of the time,
had the patent-right for invention, or at least improvement. Once
firmly engaged in his own torture--while his friend Haraucourt, bishop
of Verdun, experienced alike penalty in a similar box, and the foxy
old king paced his narrow oratory in the Bastile tower overhead--we
may be sure that Balue gave his inventive mind no more to the task of
fortifying his cages, but rather to that of opening them.

[Illustration: THE REWARD OF AN INVENTOR.]

These ugly reminiscences were not so much the cause of a prejudice I
took against Noisy, as caused by it. At Noisy I was in the full domain
of my ancient foe the railway, where two lines of the Eastern road
separate--the Ligne de Meaux and the Ligne de Mulhouse. The sight of
the unhappy second-class passengers powdered with dust, and of the
frantic nurses who had mistaken their line, and who madly