on such an
occasion was at a large fancy ball where the German was kept up till six
o'clock in the morning. The gay troupe issued forth into the golden
glowing sunshine of the April morning, and found not a single cab in
attendance; so powdered and brocaded Marquises, white-satin clad
"Mignons," Highlanders, Turks and Leaguers were forced to walk to their
homes, in many instances miles away, to the immense amusement of the
street-sweepers and naughty little boys, the only Parisians astir at
that hour of the city's universal repose.

L.H.H.

A NEW MUSEUM AT ROME.

A new museum of sculpture at Rome! One would have thought that it could
hardly be needed. Besides three vast collections--that of the Lateran,
that of the Capitol, and that wondrous world of antique sculpture at the
Vatican, itself, in fact, three museums, and each of the three alone
matchless in the world--we have the work of the hands that lived and
worked here a couple of thousands of years ago in every villa, in every
garden, almost at every corner. And yet we need, and have just
established, another museum of ancient sculpture. We are now cutting new
lines of streets--not, as you are doing, on the surface of a soil that
has never been moved save by the forces of Nature since first the
Creator divided the sea from the dry land, but--among the debris of the
successive civilizations of more than three thousand years. The laying
of our gas- and water-pipes breaks the painting on the walls of
banquet-halls whose last revel was disturbed by the irruption of the
barbarian. Our "main drainage" lies among the temples of gods whose
godlike forms are found mutilated and prostrate among the fallen
columns and tumbled architraves and cornices of their shrines.

But if no awe of the mighty past prevents the speculator and contractor
of our day from marching his army of excavators in an undeviating and
unyielding line impartially athwart the temples, the palaces, the
theatres, the baths of the perished world beneath their feet, yet in
these days of ours the work is done reverently, at least so far as not
only to respect, but to gather up with the most scrupulous care, every
available fragment of the art, and even of the common life, of those
vanished generations. If the day shall come when some future people
shall yet once again build their city on this same eternal site, and
some future social cataclysm shall have overwhelmed the works and
civilization of