“I reassured Francois as to the intention of government, and assured him there was no talk of taking away the dresses.

“The second room, that which adjoins the public exhibition room, is appropriated for the dissection of those, the mode of whose death appears to the police to be suspicious.  Its only furniture is a marble table, on which the dissections take place, and a shelf on which are placed several bottles of chlorate.  This room is immediately above the room of M. Perrin.  The dissecting table above just answers to the girls’ piano below.

“In this room, which I crossed rapidly to avoid as much as possible the sight of a body extended on the plank, I saw the little girl, who had been stifled the night before in the diligence; she was a lovely child.  The other figure was frightfully disfigured; scarcely even would his mother have recognised him.

“There remained only the public room; it is narrow, ill aired; ten or twelve black and sloping stones receive the suicides, who are placed on it almost in a state of nudity; the places are seldom all occupied, except perhaps during a revolution.  Then it is that the Morgue is recruited; two more days of glory and immortality in July, and the plague had been in Paris.

“‘It is true,’ said M. Perrin, ’we worked hard during the three days, and we were allowed the use of two assistants.  Corpses every where, within, without, at the gate, on the bank.’—­

“‘And your girls?’

“’During these days they did not leave their apartment, nor looked out to the street, nor to the river; besides, you are mistaken if you think the spectacle would have terrified them.  Brought up here, they will walk at night without a light in front of the glass, which divides the corpses from the public, without trembling; we become accustomed to any thing.’

“Methought I heard the poor children, so familiar with the idea of death, so accustomed to this domestic spectacle of their existence, asking innocently of the strangers whom they visited,—­as one would ask where is your garden, your kitchen, or your cabinet,—­’where do you keep your dead here?’

“These were all the facts I could gather with regard to the establishment.  I was opening the glass door to breathe the fresh air again, when the entrance of the crowd drove me back into the interior; they were following a bier, on which lay a body, from which the water dripped in a long stream.  From one of the hands which were closely clenched, the keeper detached a strip of coloured linen, and a fragment of lace.  ‘Ah!’ said he, ’let me look, ‘tis she!’

“‘Who is it?’

“’The nurse who was here this morning; the nurse of the little Norman girl.  Good! they may be buried together.’  And M. Perrin put on his spectacles, opened his register, and wrote in his best current-hand—­unknown!”

* * * * *

POETRY.