ng of street, square, boulevard, fortification, garden, avenue,
high-road, province, and metropolis; certainly, all of that is to be
found there, and yet the place is nothing of all that,--it is a desert.
Around this spot without a name stand the Foundling hospital,
the Bourbe, the Cochin hospital, the Capucines, the hospital
La Rochefoucauld, the Deaf and Dumb Asylum, the hospital of the
Val-de-Grace; in short, all the vices and all the misfortunes of
Paris find their asylum there. And (that nothing may lack in this
philanthropic centre) Science there studies the tides and longitudes,
Monsieur de Chateaubriand has erected the Marie-Therese Infirmary, and
the Carmelites have founded a convent. The great events of life are
represented by bells which ring incessantly through this desert,--for
the mother giving birth, for the babe that is born, for the vice that
succumbs, for the toiler who dies, for the virgin who prays, for the old
man shaking with cold, for genius self-deluded. And a few steps off
is the cemetery of Mont-Parnasse, where, hour after hour, the sorry
funerals of the faubourg Saint-Marceau wend their way. This esplanade,
which commands a view of Paris, has been taken possession of by
bowl-players; it is, in fact, a sort of bowling green frequented by old
gray faces, belonging to kindly, worthy men, who seem to continue the
race of our ancestors, whose countenances must only be compared with
those of their surroundings.

The man who had become, during the last few days, an inhabitant of this
desert region, proved an assiduous attendant at these games of bowls;
and must, undoubtedly, be considered the most striking creature of these
various groups, who (if it is permissible to liken Parisians to
the different orders of zoology) belonged to the genus mollusk. The
new-comer kept sympathetic step with the _cochonnet_,--the little
bowl which serves as a goal and on which the interest of the game must
centre. He leaned against a tree when the _cochonnet_ stopped; then,
with the same attention that a dog gives to his master's gestures, he
looked at the other bowls flying through the air, or rolling along the
ground. You might have taken him for the weird and watchful genii of the
_cochonnet_. He said nothing; and the bowl-players--the most fanatic
men that can be encountered among the sectarians of any faith--had never
asked the reason of his dogged silence; in fact, the most observing of
them thought him deaf and