its discovery.  There was no trace whereby the remains could be identified except a geranium leaf that was found imbedded in her long and disheveled tresses.  This was given to a celebrated botanist, with orders to learn, if possible, from what plant it had been taken.  The man of science visited all the houses of the neighborhood, and critically examined every specimen of the shrub he could find.  At length, in the elegant library of a young abbe, he not only discovered one of the species, but, by means of a powerful microscope, detected the very branch whence the leaf had been nipped.  By dexterous management the chef, thus scientifically put on the track, brought home the charge to the priest, who confessed the murder of the young lady in a fit of jealousy, and, by depositing her body, at night, amid the dead of humbler lineage, who had fallen in the revolutionary strife, thought to conceal all knowledge of his crime.

The lessee of an extensive ‘hotel’ had reason to believe that a child had entered and left the world in one of his tenants’ apartments, without the cognizance of a human being except the mother; and, aware, as a landlord in Paris should be, of his responsibility to the municipal government, he communicated his suspicions to the authorities.  The rooms were searched, the charge denied, and no proof elicited to warrant further action; and here the matter would have ended in any other country.  But the police agent entrusted with the inquiry raked over the contents of a pigsty in the courtyard, and discovered a square inch of thin bone, which he exhibited to an anatomist, who pronounced it a fragment of a new-born infant’s skull; the hogs were instantly killed, the contents of their stomachs examined, and small portions of the body found.  The question then arose whether the child was born alive; pieces of the lungs were placed in a basin of water, and the fact that they floated on its surface proved, beyond a doubt, that the child had breathed; the crime of infanticide was then charged upon the unhappy mother, who, appalled by this evidence of her guilt, confessed.

In the gray of the dawn a watchful observer may behold the two extremes of Paris life ominously hinted;—­a cloaked figure stealthily dropping a swathed effigy of humanity, just ‘sent into this breathing world,’ in the rotary cradle of the asylum for enfants trouves, and a cart full of the corpses of the poor, driven into the yard of a hospital for dissection.

Summoned one evening at dusk to the sick chamber of a countryman, I realized the shadows of life in Paris.  From the dazzling Boulevard the cab soon wound through dim thoroughfares, up a deserted acclivity, to a gloomy porch.  A cold mist was falling, and I heard the bell sound through a vaulted arch with desolate echoes.  When the massive door opened, a lamp suspended from a chain revealed a paved entresol and broad staircase; there was something prison-like even in