I ought next to have gone to the hospital La Pitie, where I passed much of my time during those two years.  But the people there would not know me, and my old master’s name, Louis, is but a dim legend in the wards where he used to teach his faithful band of almost worshipping students.  Besides, I have not been among hospital beds for many a year, and my sensibilities are almost as impressible as they were before daily habit had rendered them comparatively callous.

How strange it is to look down on one’s venerated teachers, after climbing with the world’s progress half a century above the level where we left them!  The stethoscope was almost a novelty in those days.  The microscope was never mentioned by any clinical instructor I listened to while a medical student. Nous avons change tout cela is true of every generation in medicine,—­changed oftentimes by improvement, sometimes by fashion or the pendulum-swing from one extreme to another.

On my way back from the hospital I used to stop at the beautiful little church St. Etienne du Mont, and that was one of the first places to which I drove after looking at my student-quarters.  All was just as of old.  The tapers were burning about the tomb of St. Genevieve.  Samson, with the jawbone of the ass, still crouched and sweated, or looked as if he did, under the weight of the pulpit.  One might question how well the preacher in the pulpit liked the suggestion of the figure beneath it.  The sculptured screen and gallery, the exquisite spiral stairways, the carved figures about the organ, the tablets on the walls,—­one in particular relating the fall of two young girls from the gallery, and their miraculous protection from injury,—­all these images found their counterpart in my memory.  I did not remember how very beautiful is the stained glass in the charniers, which must not be overlooked by visitors.

It is not far from St. Etienne du Mont to the Pantheon.  I cannot say that there is any odor of sanctity about this great temple, which has been consecrated, if I remember correctly, and, I will not say desecrated, but secularized from time to time, according to the party which happened to be uppermost.  I confess that I did not think of it chiefly as a sacred edifice, or as the resting-place, more or less secure, of the “grands hommes” to whom it is dedicated.  I was thinking much more of Foucault’s grand experiment, one of the most sublime visible demonstrations of a great physical fact in the records of science.  The reader may not happen to remember it, and will like, perhaps, to be reminded of it.  Foucault took advantage of the height of the dome, nearly three hundred feet, and had a heavy weight suspended by a wire from its loftiest point, forming an immense pendulum,—­the longest, I suppose, ever constructed.  Now a moving body tends to keep its original plane of movement, and so the great pendulum, being set swinging north and south, tended to keep