it pay?' and of
course so practical a people as this see that anarchy doesn't pay; but I
would rather attribute their conduct to nobler, more generous motives,
and in doing this seem to myself to be doing them no more than justice."

F.C. BAYLOR.

[TO BE CONCLUDED.]

OUR VILLE.

The picturesqueness of France in our day is confined almost exclusively
to its humble life. The Renaissance and the Revolution swept away in
most parts of the country moated castle, abbaye, grange, and chateau, to
replace them with luxurious but conventional piles and ruins humbly
restored and humbly inhabited. Many a farmhouse with unkempt _cour_
and dishevelled _pelouse_ is the relic of a turreted chateau,
stables are often desecrated churches, seigneurial _colombiers_
shelter swine, and battlemented portals to fortified walls serve, as
does the one of our ville, to house hideously-uniformed _douaniers_
watching the luggage of arriving travellers.

Our ville was never an aristocratic one, and to this day very few of our
names are preceded by the idealizing particle _de_. We have an
ancient history, however,--so ancient that all historians place our
origin at _un temps tresrecule_. We had houses and walls when Rouen
yonder was a marsh, and we saw Havre spring up like a mushroom only two
little centuries and a half ago. Besieged and taken, burned and ravaged,
alternately by Protestant and Catholic, no wonder our ville has not even
ruins to show that we are older than the fifteen hundreds. Still,
ancient though we are, we have always been a ville of humble
folk,--hardy sailors, brave fishers, and thrifty bourgeois,--and to-day,
as always, our highest families buy and sell and build their philistine
homes back toward the _cote_, while our humble ones picturesquely
haunt the _quais_.

The town is exquisitely situated at the foot of abrupt _cotes_,
just where the broad and tranquil river shudders with mysterious deep
heavings and meets its dolphin-hued death in the all-devouring sea. Away
off in the shimmering distance is the second seaport city of France. On
still days,--and our gray or golden Norman days are almost always
still,--faint muffled sounds of life, the throbbing of factories, the
farewell boom of cannon from ships setting forth across the Atlantic,
even the musical notes of the Angelus, float across the water to us as
dreamily vague as perhaps our earth-throbs and passion-pulses reach a
world beyond the clouds. This