influence. It was wonderful to think what was
being effected in that short time, and with those
little words; wonderful to think to what good
and bad purpose they had been spoken first and
last since originally they had been put together;
wonderful when at last they ceased, the wild joy
of the Hallelujah Chorus succeeded them, and
when presently the TWO who had gone into the
choir a few moments before, each single and
alone, came out together hand in hand, the die
cast, the pledge given, suspense no longer
written in anxious characters upon their faces,
but succeeded by the calmness which belongs to
certainty.

And so they went forth into the world together
by that western gate, and the curtain fell
again and finally, behind the last of the wedding
guests.

AN HOTEL TO "PUT UP" AT.

L'HÔTEL is, in a topographical point of view,
immediately behind the Grande Opéra of Paris.
In point of attractiveness, the Grand Opera is
far behind the Hotel. At the Opera, a large
portion of the public, for a large portion of the
night, is wearied with so-called pastime. At the
Hotel, the performances never pall. If the
spectator does not find entertainment enough,
he has only to become an actor in them. The
rules of the house permit him to watch or share
the play of passions there, at will.

Parisians say L'Hôtel, as Londoners say The
Tower; as Mussulmans, Al Koran—for eminence,
and for short. The Hotel is also styled Hôtel
Drouot, from one of the streets on which it
faces; and exhaustively as definition, Hôtel des
Ventes des Commissaires Priseurs—Auctioneers'
Sales Hall, as you might translate in English. It
contains sixteen auction-rooms on ground floor
and first story, and a court-yard that often serves
as a seventeenth. Into it, and out of it, from
early autumn, round again to early summer, the
"season" nearly circling in the year, all sorts of
movable French properties are daily put up, and
daily knocked down!

Hither come all house furnishings; lowliest
pots and pans and grossest earthenware; vases
in bronze and precious metals, and marbles
of cunningest workmanship, and Sèvres sets
of fragile elegance; family portraits which, if
like, would justify a cheerful resignation in the
breasts of relicts bereaved of the originals;
canvases by masters, whose counterfeit presentment
of beauty tutors nature. Huddled in this room
are poverty's "honest, mean habiliments," and
instruments of labour, and small domestic gods;
in the next room are displayed the late contents
of a broken stock-gambler's splendid apartments,
or the wardrobe and costly thingamies of some
frail goddess of the neighbouring Opera—

With silken coats, and caps, and golden rings,
With ruffs, and cuffs, and farthingales, and things;
With scarfs, and fans, and double change of bravery,
With amber bracelets, beads, and all this knavery—

which the gentleman who fell with the stock
once helped to pay for, belike—and also that
young Gandin, fanciful speculator in such values,
who has come to re-purchase some jewelled ex-
token of affection, given when she was his
treasure—and he was her treasury. The shrewd
marchande de toilette and the shrewder Israelite
guilefully watch both goods and Gandin, with
view to new profits out of both. Here, are
rush-bottomed chairs, plain and rigid, from
hard-working St. Antoine; and here, fauteuils
damask-quilted, soft-armed, pliant, yielding,
the property of the Vicomte d'Olcefar, while
yet that distinguished nobleman gave himself
the pains to live and consume the fruits of the
earth. At the gateway there, plebeian white
wood and ramshackle walnut wood have
familiarly met, and are jolting invisibly-jointed
rosewood, palisandre, and exquisite marqueterie.

Not only do the social estates of to-day send
their representatives here—from saloon and
attic, from the noble faubourg and the industrial
quarters, from the central boulevards and the
barriers—but the historical periods too. In
Salle Number Six, Monsieur Escribe is knocking
down stiff Romanaster uglinesses of the first
Empire; awaiting the like fate to-morrow, are
gathered in the next room, chairs and stools from
which the Revolution pushed the ancien régime;
or tables that were rioted over—and under—in
the nights of the Regency; or mirrors that did
not blush to reflect the beauties of the latter days
of that "Well Beloved," of whom Niebuhr has
written the terrible epitaph, "God at last took
pity on France and had Louis the Fifteenth
die;" chiffonniers, writing-desks, work-tables,
many such things that recal the witty abbé, and
the frivolous marquises, and the unvirtuous
women, who lived so gaily and naughtily while
the body of the state was festering towards
corruption, in the diseased time which Dr. Guillotin
finally had to prescribe for; here likewise are
caskets, and cabinets, and buffets of earlier
quainter ages, tankards, carved sword-hilts, door
knockers, vases of the Renaissance (mostly, the
expert says, the work of Benvenuto Cellini, who
must have been a singularly industrious
artificer), odds and ends of the middle ages, lamps
and candlesticks of the dark ages, armour of the
Crusaders, Carlovingian battle-axes, Merovingian
swords, matarae and gaesa of the Celtic
Gauls, and everything left of their milder utensils
in the culinary or religious way.

                 A routh o' auld nicknackets,
         Rusty airn caps and jinglin jackets,
         And parritch-pats and auld saut backets
                                             Before the Flood.

The department of antiquities and curiosities
is by no means limited by French history and
geography. They come from beyond the Rhine,
and the Alps, and the Channel, and from the
islands beyond the sea. China and Japan
furnish largely; since the Franco-British war
and fiery allied irruption into the Summer
Palace, the Celestial Empire with especial
copiousness; and Persia, and Egypt, and India