io5 The Public Gardens and Parks of Paris. 



greatest success by the city of Paris, and will probably succeed the 

 paving stones, macadamizing, and all the rest of it. Some beautiful 

 smooth roads through the Luxembourg gardens are made of this 

 powdered asphalte, and without the rolling with heavy rollers, the 

 hot " smoothing irons " being used. 



Our English cemeteries are often beautiful gardens, quite green, 

 and abounding with trees, weeping and otherwise ; while in the 

 country churchyard 



" There scattered oft, the earliest of the year, 



By hands unseen are showers of violets found." 

 And 



" Beneath those rugged elms, that yew tree's shade, 

 Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap," 



there is a quiet verdure which makes the spot sweet to look upon j 

 but with the cemeteries of Paris it is very different. There human 

 love is lavish in its testimony, but the result is ghastly to behold. 

 The quantity of the flowers of the sand Gnaphalium that is there 

 woven into wreaths, or immortelles, for placing on and about 

 the tombs in the cemeteries, is something astounding. Next to 

 seeing the contents of a hundred Morgues displayed, the great 

 spread of decaying everlastings is the most ghastly sight. They 

 hang them on the poor little wooden crosses, they pile them inside 

 on the covered tombs, they hang them on the few green bushes, 

 tjiey sling them under little spans of glass placed purposely over 

 many tombs to protect the immortelles from the weather, and in 

 every other way, till in ever}- part, and particularly the part where 

 the second and third class departed are buried, there is scarcely any- 

 thing to be seen but everlastings in every stage of decay, the coup 

 cVoeil being most depressing to anybody used to green English or 

 Irish churchyards. A considerable portion of each large Parisian 

 cemetery seems made to be inhabited by ghouls. In addition to 

 decomposing composite, there is no end of small crockeryware art, 

 and countless little objects made in beadwork, and brought here 

 by the survivors of the dead to hang on the little black crosses or 



