intellectual country after beholding "many peoples and
cities;" but of the settled Parisian, who keeps his appointed place, and
lives on his own floor like the oyster on his rock, a curious vestige of
the credulity, the slowness, and the simplicity of bygone ages.

For one of the singularities of Paris is, that it unites twenty
populations completely different in character and manners. By the side of
the gypsies of commerce and of art, who wander through all the several
stages of fortune or fancy, live a quiet race of people with an
independence, or with regular work, whose existence resembles the dial of
a clock, on which the same hand points by turns to the same hours. If no
other city can show more brilliant and more stirring forms of life, no
other contains more obscure and more tranquil ones. Great cities are like
the sea: storms agitate only the surface; if you go to the bottom, you
find a region inaccessible to the tumult and the noise.

For my part, I have settled on the verge of this region, but do not
actually live in it. I am removed from the turmoil of the world, and live
in the shelter of solitude, but without being able to disconnect my
thoughts from the struggle going on. I follow at a distance all its
events of happiness or grief; I join the feasts and the funerals; for how
can he who looks on, and knows what passes, do other than take part?
Ignorance alone can keep us strangers to the life around us: selfishness
itself will not suffice for that.

These reflections I made to myself in my attic, in the intervals of the
various household works to which a bachelor is forced when he has no
other servant than his own ready will. While I was pursuing my
deductions, I had blacked my boots, brushed my coat, and tied my cravat;
I had at last arrived at the important moment when we pronounce
complacently that all is finished, and that well.

A grand resolve had just decided me to depart from my usual habits. The
evening before, I had seen by the advertisements that the next day was a
holiday at Sevres, and that the china manufactory would be open to the
public. I was tempted by the beauty of the morning, and suddenly decided
to go there.

On my arrival at the station on the left bank, I noticed the crowd
hurrying on in the fear of being late. Railroads, besides many other
advantages, possess that of teaching the French punctuality. They will
submit to the clock when they are convinced that it is their master;