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the Seine and its fourteen bridges. Oh ! how long we 

 would like to tarry here, that is provided any one could 

 guarantee us that a Nihilist, Socialist or Communist 

 mob might not rise in the night and burn us to a cinder 

 in the smoking ruins of the capital ! 



Adieu ! then for the present grim historic Louvre,, 

 with your inexhaustible treasures of art, &c. Adieu 

 for a few hours, lofty tapering, sculptured medieval 

 church spires ! Adieu green, solemn groves of the Bois 

 de Boulogne only now recuperating from the wholesale 

 devastations inflicted, in 1871, by those enemies from 

 within, more merciles by far than the Prussians, the 

 Paris Commune ! 



However varied and powerful the attraction of Paris, 

 there has been for us, from our earliest youth another 

 spot, which in our day-dreams we used to picture to 

 ourselves as a vista of those oriental palaces of which 

 we had read in the " Arabian Nights, " such marvelous 

 tales : that is the summer palace, parks and hunting 

 grounds of French Kings, from Louis XIII downwards, 

 gaudy, inimitable Versailles. And yet how obscure 

 its beginnings ! History makes mention of a certain 

 Hugo de Versaliis, a contemporary of the first Cape- 

 tian Kings, who owned a seignorial manor, on the 

 very site where the famous palace now stands. Little 

 could be have foreseen that the day would come when 

 the solitude round his hunting lodge, in the narrow 

 valley of Versailles would echo to the brilliant fStes 

 given to the crowned heads of Europe by the greatest 

 sovereign of the Bourbon race of Kings, and that the 

 hunting carols of proud nobles as well as the " clairon 

 du roi, " the accents of eloquent prelates like Bossuet 

 and Masillon, the boisterous songs of the banquet, of 

 the godless wassailers of Louis XV and his Pompa- 

 dours and Dubarrys would on a future day replace the 

 sweet chimes of the Angelus, at the little priory church 

 of Saint-Julien, close by. 



